Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/46

 22 die of hunger; on the other a mass of tenants, who, being unable to pay their landlords' dues, lose the essential right on which their liberty depends—that of leaving their tenancy at the end of their term. The first-named, having lost the scrap of land on which they lived, are forced either to beg or to give service; the others, who have received a subvention, in some form, from their landlords, find its repayment an impossibility. In the most ordinary circumstances a peasant entering into possession of his farm received an advance of three roubles. In ten years he had thirty roubles to pay, besides either fifty-six kopecks or one rouble fifty-six kopecks for the pojiloié—say, about 300 roubles in all, in our money.

In most cases the finding of such a sum was a pure impossibility. Therefore there was difficulty at the very start: the conversion of the debt that kept rolling up, the serebro, as it was called (serebro, money), into a sort of obligation which bound the debtor to the soil; the habitual assimilation of the serebrianiki to the serfs in common law, Kholopy dokladnyié, or kabalnyié. Here we have the history of the insolvent farmers of the ager publicus at Rome, as set forth by Fustel de Coulanges.

In fact, from the second half of the sixteenth century, liberty, while it was the theoretical right of most peasants, had practically become the privilege of a constantly decreasing number of proprietors and solvent tenants.

But what had caused this general impoverishment of the agricultural class? Easily guessed! A state of war is a most expensive condition. The Muscovite Government, when it adopted the fighting organization to which I have already referred, and perpetually increased its army, was forced to increase its expenditure and pay the 'service men,' whose numbers grew from day to day. Then, when it placed its establishment in some degree on a European footing, it had to pay for the necessary plant, for the arms imported from foreign parts, and the employés recruited in every European country. And wherewithal? The only funds it could command, the only real wealth of the country, lay in the soil. The land, then, had to bear all these new charges. To find pomiéstia for the sloojilyié the peasants were dispossessed, and to pay the foreign handicraftsmen the Government taxed the pomiéchtchiki, who, themselves hard pressed, ground down their tenants.

The land answered for everything, paid for everything, became a sort of State coin, convertible into labour, military and civil service, obligations of every kind. It made no fight. It had never, even in the hands of the vottchinniki, been subjected to any complete, tangible appropriation. The