Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/174

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In history this assembly bears the name of Stoglavnyï-sobor, or the 'Conciliable of the Hundred Chapters,' which it owes to an arbitrary division of the report of its deliberations. My readers will remember, in this connection, the 'Hundred and One Griefs' of the Diet of Worms. It was the fashion of those times. As usual, the conciliable included the Metropolitan, the Archbishops of Novgorod and Rostov, and many Bishops, archimandrites, and priors. The lay element was represented by the great Court dignitaries, and by the whole body of the boïarskaïa douma. Ivan did not fail to make speeches of his own. He multiplied his rhetorical efforts, made an act of contrition, and appealed to the counsels and prayers of his whole audience. All this was his usual course of scenic effect. Then the new Code was considered and approved. This was a mere matter of form. The questions affecting the work of legislation had been previously cleared up between the Sovereign and his lay counsellors, the only persons concerned in them. All that Ivan expected from the composite gathering now assembled, and representing the highest moral authority in the country, was a recognition of his reforms, whether accomplished or proclaimed. This was the ordinary procedure, and an invariable feature of every successive avatar of the Parliamentary existence of the country. By the way, however, the Sovereign was pleased to call on the assistance of the conciliable as to certain fresh legal proposals, in connection with which he sought, not its adhesion, but its advice. These were the suppression of the miéstnitchestvo in time of war; a revision of the Crown grants of land, with the object of bringing them into proportion with the amount of service rendered; the means to be employed for fixing the level of taxation by remedying the present fluctuations of the taxable population; the putting down of taverns; the bestowal of landed properties on the widows and orphan daughters of boïars; and the establishment of an official cadastral survey. …

We must not expect method any more than we must expect perspicuity, from the legislators of this epoch. Their procedure was one of riddles and of jerks. The assembly made some attempt to fulfil the task imposed upon it. A remedy for the fluctuation of the population was by no means easy to find, and the gathering suggested none. The plan for putting down the taverns, which had been inspired by the religious party, ran counter to the fiscal interest, and did not advance beyond a pious wish. But it was decided that in war-time 'places' were not to count; the cadastral survey and the revision of the landed properties were undertaken,