Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/162

 138 of freedom; the outcome of a Government extemporization, and not of the long travail of a nation's life, a superstructure mechanically adjusted on the exterior of a huge archaic building, and not the fruit of any internal development at all—was no more than an incident and an ephemeral phenomenon in the country's history. Between 1550 and 1653, sixteen of these assemblies were called, and the memories and regrets left by the last are neither very sharp nor over deep. As an arbitrary act on the part of the only real power had called them into life, so did another arbitrary act send them back into the darkness, and neither their existence nor their exit made much mark upon the destinies of the Russian race. If the constitutional inaptitude of this particular branch of the Slav family for the free forms of political existence, acknowledged by some historians, be an antiphrasis, and its vocation for perpetual absolutism a blasphemy, it is quite certain that no serious attempt at a Parliamentary system was appropriate to the shadow of the Kremlin in the sixteenth century.

The whole historical importance of the assembly of 1550 lies in the troubles which paved the way to the expedient, and in the other and more efficacious measures of which it was the starting-point. The Tsar had proved that he realized the painful sores from which the body of society was suffering. He had stripped them boldly. He was about to show his anxiety to do more than dress them with the panacea thus supplied. The following year was to inaugurate the era of reform.



the heart of the intelligent class—a very small one, numerically speaking, in the days of Ivan's rule, but eager, nevertheless, to study certain political and social problems—and out of the focus formed by the men who thought and discussed and wrote, a twofold current of reform passed at this moment, converging, in spite of its exceedingly diverse points of departure, on analogous, if not identical, objects. In both cases the ideas and calculations advanced dealt with the burning question of the day; that of the possession