If there be no prohibition for external merchants, from the ranks of the nobles, officers or peasants, the merchants will not be able to become enriched, and it will not be possible for the revenue to be increased.
... At the present time boyárs, noblemen and their people, soldiers and peasants carry on commerce, without paying any tax, and many merchants carry on trade in their names, and pay no tax. Not half the revenue is collected, nor ever can be collected, if commerce is not to be made free from the nobles and officials, since many mighty people have taken to trade, and some who are not themselves powerful but are not subject to the magistrate.
I know, for example, one case in a Nóvgorod county where there are a hundred or two of merchant-peasants, and who do not pay a farthing’s worth of taxes. And if a collector, seeing them, tries to collect the revenue, the gentry take the peasant’s part and send the collector away more dead than alive, and the government officers look on, and dare not interfere. And there are some wealthy men, who have some five or six hundred peasants carrying on such illicit trade, and pay not a farthing to the Great Tsar. If all be arranged as I have proposed, commerce will awaken as if from a dream.
It is a very bad custom the merchant people have, to do each other wrong by cheating each other. Both foreigners and Russians are in the habit of showing good-looking wares that are badly made within or filled up with bad stuff; or bad wares are mixed with wares of a good quality and are sold as if of good quality, taking for them an unfair price, and greatly deceiving inexperienced people. They give wrong weights and measures, deceive in price, and do not think all that to be a sin, although they cause so much injustice to the inexperienced. Yet those who deceive are in the end ruined through their own iniquity, and become impoverished.
... In order to establish justice in the Merchant Rows, let there be appointed hundred-men and fifty-men and ten-men, and over the shop where there is an hundred-man let there be nailed a round board, painted white, so that it can be easily seen, and on that board let there be written “hundred-man.” Do the same with the shop of the fifty-man and ten-man, so that those who purchase any goods may know where to show their wares, if they should want to find out whether they have received the right weight, or measure, or whether the wares are good or bad, and whether they have paid the correct price for them.
If a merchant have received more than the worth of the wares, let him be fined a dime or two for every unfair kopek, and let him be beaten with rods or a whip, that he may not do so again in the future; and if he repeat his offence, let the fine and punishment be increased.
But if one give wrong measure and weight, or sell different goods from what the buyer demanded, and give him inferior goods, let his punishment be much more severe, and the fine be ten times the price of the goods.
And if an hundred-man, or fifty-man, or ten-man be guilty of such a transgression, let the fine for the ten-man be tenfold, for the fifty-man fiftyfold, and for the hundred-man hundredfold, and let the punishment be with the knout, as many strokes as may be decided upon. The hundred-men and fifty-men should receive very stringent instructions to watch without relenting the ten-men and not to be indulgent to them, but to fear the law like fire, lest their transgressions reach the ears of high personages. And the ten-men should watch all the shops under their charge, and see to it that no inferior wares are adulterated by the admixture of better material, but that they are sold such as they are, the good wares as good wares, the mediocre as mediocre, and the poor as poor, and that right weights and measures be given, and that the prices be not raised on the goods, and that there be no adulterations. Let only the right price be asked, and let them measure foreign stuffs, brocade, calamanco and silks from the first end, and not from the last. And no matter what buyer there come, whether rich or poor, whether experienced or inexperienced, let them all be treated in the same fair manner, and let there not a kopek be added to the price of one rouble or ten roubles.
Whatever fine is to be collected should be collected by the hundred-men, without delay, on the day the offence has been committed. All the fines ought to be entered in a ledger which should be reported every month in the proper office. No transaction, neither great nor small, should take place with the foreigners who frequent the fairs, without the permission of the Chief Commander of the Merchant Guild. Whoever dares to sell even a rouble’s worth of goods to these foreigners without the permission of the Chief Commander shall be fined a hundredfold, a hundred roubles for every rouble sold, and the punishment shall be administered with the knout, as many strokes as may be decreed, that they should remember them and never do so again.