Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/32

 8 enjoyed certain rights and privileges, clearly denoting their former quality as independent Sovereigns, and fought for them fiercely.

But read the Code drawn up by the grandfather of the Terrible, the Soudiébnik of 1497: not a trace does it bear of all these rights and privileges and pretensions! The clergy once set apart, it divides all the remaining dwellers in the country into two categories, which have no social quality about them, and in which the diverse conditions history creates count not at all: 'men who serve' on one side, 'men who do not serve on the other'—sloojilyié and niésloojilyié, nothing more. What does this mean? It means that the legislator wiped out all historical precedents, and, dealing despotically with the mass of beings at his disposal, divided it up according to the constitution of the existing settlement at Moscow—that, as I have endeavoured to show, of a campaigning army.

In a regiment, there are neither princes nor churls, neither merchants nor labourers—there are soldiers, corporals, officers. And here we have a regiment. In a prison, the prisoners are only known by their numbers. And this is, or is to be, a prison. The sloojilyié are soldiers, who are to help their chief to 'gather up the soil of Russia.' The niésloojilyié are the labourers, the fatigue-parties, who feed the army on its march. Neither class has any place, or dignity, or function, save that allotted to it by the regulation. Every man to serve in the ranks—that is the general order. No sign of any hierarchy of birth. In the first category, with the boïars, the Princes, the great officers of the Crown, the chief functionaries, and hardly distinguished from them by a subordination of a purely administrative character, we see the humble workers, civil and military, blacksmiths and gunners, carpenters and private soldiers. Merchants and agriculturists, again, in the other category, are mingled together under the common law of the taxation imposed on them. The sloojilyié of the highest rank do, indeed, enjoy certain privileges—they perform the higher functions, they own the land. In the eye of the law their testimony carries greater weight, and the indemnity rightfully paid them for an offence is three times that a mere diak (clerk) can claim. But this tariff of honour, varying according to grades and occupations, affects every rank. There is nothing social about it, as yet. It forms part of the emoluments assigned to each post.

I have yet to explain how it became possible to carry out this artificial grouping and despotic classification of the social forces. It was inevitable, in the first place, that elements so torn apart and cast into new and arbitrary moulds should have but little coherence at the outset. As regards the