Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/159

 Rh texts we arrive at a plausible conjecture: the assembly of 1550 was no more than a gathering of officials, an incident in the administrative life of that system the features of which I have already sketched, and the nature of which Ivan never dreamt of altering.

He had so little thought, at this juncture, of appealing to his people against his boïars—that is, against his officials—that, though he abused them roundly, his reproaches were addressed to themselves, and to themselves only. His discourse on the Red Square was an apostrophe ad homines, combined with a use of the third person. What could he have made out of the people? And how would he have got hold of it, to begin with—I mean men of that class who would have been capable of understanding anything about problems of this nature? And still less could he have found men fit to make any better hand of the work the others had done so ill.

But what was he driving at, then? At this: Without laying his hand on the system of 'service' nor on the sloojilyié lioodi, who had been abusing it so long and so hideously, Ivan hoped to improve the working of the machine by taking the command of the machinery into his own hands, and confiding it, in part, to creatures chosen by himself. Hence his announcement that he would do justice in his own person, and hence his appeal to Adachev's services. So much for the future. For the past, as 'everything could not be repaired,' it was necessary to pass a wet sponge over the face of an over-crowded slate. Thousands of complaints were waiting their turn, piles of papers were accumulating, in the hope of a settlement which, by the ordinary methods of the slowest and most complicated procedure ever known, was utterly impossible. Wherefore 'the triumph of virtue and of love,' like the 'reconciliation of all the Christians in the Empire,' simply meant, in the phraseology of that period, the substitution of a friendly arrangement for that interminable procedure. A tolerably short interval had been assigned for this purpose, no doubt, for in 1551 Ivan, found himself in a position to announce that the settlement of all the matters in suspense had been carried through.

The convoking of popular assemblies, in the strict meaning of that term, did not enter into the plan of the political edifice which Ivan had inherited, and the destruction of which he by no means contemplated, except in so far as to alter its internal arrangements at a future date, and thus adapt it to more modern needs. There was no place here for any Parliamentary institution, and so little idea was there of its introduction that the representatives of the aristocratic oligarchy,