THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE 263
ture upon a solid foundation ard to enlist the aid of the State Audit
Department. On familiarizing themselves with the details of the
work, the representatives of the Audit Department ought to be able
to appreciate the difficulties confronting the Union and to defend
it afterward, should any fault be found by the higher authorities.
Fortunately, the representatives of the Audit Department lived up
to the expectations. After two examinations of the accounts, made
without previous notice, the Auditor General officially admitted
that the bookkeeping of the central institutions of the Zemstvo Union
 was faultless. He also appointed one of the higher officials of
his department to represent him permanently on the Central Committee
 of the Union and to direct its accounting in such a way as to
prevent in future any possible misunderstanding with the Government
 on purely formal grounds.
With the aid of this official representative of the Government, a
thorough and systematic reorganization of the accounting of the
Union and of its various departments was carried out during the
second half of the War. The need for such a reorganization had
been felt for some time. With a monthly budget of, at first, 6,000,-000
 rubles, rising afterward to 20,000,000 and finally 60,000,000
rubles, it was indispensable to elaborate a uniform system of accounting
 and disbursements, to be obligatory for all the institutions
of the Union. Even from the point of view of mere economy, the
huge organization of the Union seemed to require a regular system
and stringent rules. We have seen that in the matter of supply it
had been necessary to adopt a very strict and careful budgetary
system. At first the estimates were prepared for periods of three
months, and later twice a year. The methods of preparing the estimates
 and the system of bookkeeping and accounting adopted independently
 by the various institutions were very diverse, and the central
 organs found it necessary to undertake the difficult and tedious
task of reducing them to some uniform plan. They, moreover, had to
induce all the local institutions to adopt the same methods. The effort
 to bring about the voluntary surrender of unrestricted freedom
which had prevailed during the first stage of the Union’s work
proved to be the most difficult in the life of the Union. Demands
presented by headquarters in too rigorous and urgent a form, especially
 when containing a taint of that government routine which was
s0 cordially detested by most zemstvo workers, might have paralyzed