Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/161

 Rh elective system for the bestowal of certain functions, the persons thus elected found themselves in possession of a sort of representative authority. It became the established custom, for certain deliberative purposes and the settlement of certain reckonings, to summon to the capital, at arbitrary intervals of time, a selection of officials, some of whom held an electoral mandate, not as members of an assembly, but as performers of their administrative functions. The admission to this assembly depended on a different system. In what did this consist? Was the choice made by election, and, if so, what form did that election take? We know nothing of all this. However it may have been, the officials summoned to the assembly only appeared as, and because they were, officials. They did not represent social, they represented administrative, interests. They raised their voices, not as the advocates of certain corporate groups, but as Government organs, called to furnish information to the central administration, and take their orders from it. Here was all that underlay the fictitious appearance of this deliberative assembly, from which the Government occasionally made believe to take advice, but to which, in sober truth, it simply gave its orders.

Of any such thing as political rights pertaining to these phantom representatives, or to those who elected them—in spite of the wily endeavours of the Muscovite policy to cultivate an illusion, favoured by the uncertain form to which the institution was always restricted—there never was a question. As a matter of fact, once more, there is no trace of any legislative work accomplished by any of these assemblies nor even of any spontaneous decision come to by them. The nomad character of the first Russian settlements had prevented any development of corporative elements, or the formation of any strongly-constituted classes. The task of grouping the scattered forces of society had thus fallen to the central power, which, in performing it, had naturally applied itself more to imposing duties on the associations it called into being than to acknowledging that they possessed rights of their own. As a consequence, the political edifice, both in its general structure and as to its inner details, was entirely founded on the principle of 'dues,' the tiaglo; and even the introduction of the elective system into this architecture did not modify its fundamental features. In the absence of any sufficiently developed social interests, or any adequate consciousness of them, electors and elected saw nothing in this concession beyond another burden to be added to its predecessors. Even if it possessed an elective basis, which is by no means clearly proved, the institution of the ziémskiié sobory—the result of a State need, and not a victory won by the emancipated forces