257 Sweden, and the civil servants all know their entire job,” the bailiffs could not be given a larger workload if proper order was to be maintained. Furthermore, it was argued that “the basis for the whole economy, both in the town and in the district, lies in such a thorough division and arrangement into provinces and districts, and if such a basis is not securely established, it will be difficult for the colleges, too, to achieve the intended order and correctness.” In other words, the central organs for fiscal administration would not be able to function unless the local organs followed the prescribed procedures. In the case of Russia, Pick emphasized that before a decision could be reached about the size of the districts, it would be necessary to determine to what extent “the provincial bailiff himself is to collect the imposts from the peasants, or whether their landlords are to see to this and to collect the revenues from the peasants they own once a quarter and hand them over to the provincial bailiff, the bailiff could handle the collection of taxes from three or four thousand In the latter case. Pick felt that ” 166 peasants. In the former case, however, it would be necessary to reduce the tax collection district to about one thousand peasants, and even then the Russian bailiff would have a larger workload than his Swedish colleague, since, unlike his Swedish counterpart, he would have to collect the taxes himself. Elsewhere, Pick wrote that, “in the district, one could appoint, for example, one zemskii kamissar and one provincial scrivener per 3,000 In addition, the Russian provincial bailiff would need. ” 167 peasants. according to Pick, five or six persons to help him administer his district. These assistants should be recruited from among “the lower and poorer noblemen” and should correspond to the Swedish parish bailiffs. The Senate had some comparative tables drawn up, in which the previous provinces in the St. Petersburg guberniia were divided into districts with three thousand and five thousand peasant homesteads, respectively. The statistical material for these calculations was provided by the homestead censuses of 1678 and 1710, the former of which had been conducted in connection with the fact that the homestead had been adopted as the unit of taxation {podvornoe oblozhenie).^^^ The census of 1710 was undertaken in order to increase the tax base by recording in the farm registers Ibid., 1. 32. Ibid., loc.cit. Ibid., 1. 27. Ibid., 1. 32v. N. V. UsTiUGOV, “K voprosu o raskladke povinnostei po dvorovomu chislu v kontse XVII v.,” in V. P. Volgin et al., eds., Sbornik statei “Akademiku B. D. Grekovu ko dniu 70-letiia" (Moscow, 1952), 221. 17 - Peterson 165 169
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