of a village. Cities and towns had
municipal elders (machi-doshiyori), under whom also nanushi
officiated. The guilds constituted a most important feature of this
local autonomic system. They consisted of five householders each,
being therefore called gonin-gumi, and their main functions were to
render mutual aid in all times of distress, and to see that there
were no evasions of the taxes or violations of the law. In fact, the
Bakufu interfered as little as possible in the administrative systems
of the agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial classes, and the
feudatories followed the same rule.

FINANCE

The subject of finance in the Bakufu days is exceedingly complicated,
and a very bare outline will suffice. It has already been noted that
the unit of land-measurement varied from time to time and was never
uniform throughout the empire. That topic need not be further
discussed. Rice-fields were divided into five classes, in accordance
with which division the rates of taxation were fixed. Further, in
determining the amount of the land-tax, two methods were followed;
one by inspection, the other by average. In the case of the former,
the daikwan repaired in the fall of each year to the locality
concerned, and having ascertained the nature of the crop harvested,
proceeded to determine the rate of tax. This arrangement lent itself
so readily to abuse that the system of averages was substituted as
far as possible. That is to say, the average yield of crops for the
preceding ten or twenty years served as a standard.

The miscellaneous taxes were numerous. Thus, there were taxes on
business; taxes for post-horses and post-carriers; taxes in the form
of labour, which were generally fixed at the rate of fifty men per
hundred koku, the object in view being work on river banks, roads,
and other public institutions; taxes to meet the cost of collecting
taxes, and taxes to cover defalcations. Sometimes the above taxes
were levied in kind or in actual labour, and sometimes they were
collected in money. To facilitate collection in cities, merchants
were required to form guilds according to their respective
businesses, and the head of each guild had to collect the tax payable
by the members. Thus, upon a guild of sake-brewers a tax of a
thousand gold ryo was imposed, and a guild of wholesale dealers in
cotton had to pay five hundred ryo. There was a house-tax which was
assessed by measuring the area of the land on which a bui