Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/375

 Rh with the object it was necessary to attain. After the capture of Kazan and Astrakan, numbers of other Princes offered to pay tribute, and among them Iadiger, a Siberian Prince, who held a Tartar iourt in the middle of the present province of Tobolsk, and reigned over some 30,000 subjects. But few of the engagements taken were kept. In 1556 Iadiger only sent in 700 out of the 30,000 marten-skins he had promised—one for each inhabitant. He excused himself on the score of the violence and exactions he had been forced to endure on the part of his neighbours, against whom the Tsar had promised him assistance and protection. But the Tartar Princes, who were perpetually fighting amongst themselves, were not easily put down, or even reached. When hard pressed they fled into the steppes, and ensured themselves impunity by accepting the sovereignty of Moscow, coupled with similar obligations, quite as unfaithfully fulfilled.

When Ivan's attention became quite absorbed by his Livonian enterprise everything went thoroughly astray, and the Tsar's last envoy, a sort of half ambassador, half tax-collector, was killed. No effectual and lasting result was attainable in such a country, save by a conquest on quite different lines, of the necessary elements for which the Muscovite Empire was by no means destitute.

Even nowadays, mobility is one of the most characteristic features of the race which has peopled the huge tracts of the European east and the Asiatic west, and I have already pointed out the reasons which account for this (p. 23). 'The fish seeks the deepest water, and man the place where he can live best.' This proverb reproduces, in most expressive fashion, a tendency which is the secret of the great work of colonization accomplished by the subjects of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

For this work the resources supplied by the basin of the Piétchora—the base of perpetual military enterprises up till the sixteenth century—were insufficient. Only an industrial population could have turned them to account, and the Muscovite nomads were a race of husbandmen. It was on a private family that the honour devolved of imparting a more useful character and a more favourable direction to the national expansion, by appealing to the powerful current of emigration which constituted its real strength, and directing that current towards the basin of the river Kama.

At a very early date the Stroganov family had been given special privileges, with a view to populating the uninhabited tracts in the district of Oustoug, north of Viatka. The social