Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/34

 10 lacked any sufficient consistency. Its descent was not over ancient, and it had no solid foundation. Under the feudal régime, the relations between the Sovereign and the great lords had their counterpart, on a lower scale, in those between the nobles and their churls. Serfdom completed vassalage. Here, as we shall see, amidst a free agricultural population, which only gave the great landed proprietors a sorely-bargained and disputed, and always most precarious, forced service, the counterpart was non-existent. And to use these floating elements at will and solidify them, under another form, into a military organization, the power of Moscow must have been strongly constituted indeed.

The origin and nature of this power have given rise to much conjecture. The school of history at the teaching of which I have already hinted has chosen to recognise it as an organic phenomenon, arising out of the temperament of the Slav race, domiciled, by the chances of destiny, in a land far distant from its ancient home. It has also taken it to be the only régime that has proved capable of supplying the special needs of this race, politically speaking, and of insuring the living existence of the settlements founded by it. After careers occasionally very brilliant, but always short, all the Slav States founded on other principles have proved themselves insufficiently protected against an abnormal development of the aristocratic element, and weakening of the central power.

But whence came the special inclination of the Slav colony in the north-east to adopt this régime, and its adaptability to it? Monsieur Zabiéline has ascribed the phenomenon to the principle of domestic absolutism developed by the teaching of the Eastern Church. Monsieur Kostomarov holds that it proceeds from the Tartar conquest, and others have attributed it to the influence of the Finnish element. These three explanations are of small value. The Eastern Church wielded quite as great an influence, or greater, over Southern Russia during the Kiev period, and during that very period the application of a personal and absolute power, as realized in Moscow towards the close of the fifteenth century, was unknown. The most ancient information we have as to the Slav peoples—Byzantine chronicles, Procopius' historical works, those of the Emperor Leon, of Dithmar, of Merseburg—shows us popular assemblies wielding supreme power, or sharing it, and the Slavonic tribes settled in Russia form no exception to this rule. As Nestor testifies, they even did