Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/66

 42 eat out of the same dish with another and less well-connected prelate. In the 'black' clergy, indeed, there was a hierarchy of monasteries, and monks within the communities quarrelled over their places in the processions that followed the holy ikons. Merchants obeyed the general lead, and the great dramatist Ostrovski has demonstrated the survivance even to our own day of the habits then contracted in that class of life.

But a time came when, on a day of battle, in the very face of the enemy, two Generals began a squabble of this sort. This was at Orcha, in 1514, and the battle was a failure. A change was indispensable. The Government tried everything—the suspension of precedence for a fixed period during a campaign, for instance, and severe penalties in the case of any unjustified claim—but did not dare to lay its hand on the unwritten, but all the more strongly rooted, privilege. The aristocracy used all its powers, fired its last shots, set all its last haughty hopes upon the die, and forgot, while thus plunged in its calculations of nobility, that power was slipping from its hands. For many years, indeed, the highest places were given to the nobles, because at first the State could not fill them up otherwise. But when other candidates were to be had. the miéstnitchestvo was powerless to resist a democratic levelling process harmonizing with the State's own principles. By putting forward the posts bestowed by the Sovereign's free-will as a factor in family calculations, it destroyed the generic element of its own social and corporate value; it elaborated, as a reinvestment, a collective body of another kind, more docile, more pliable, and but for which the Russia of the sixteenth century might perhaps have failed in her tremendous task; but it was not a class—it was a crew rather, a regiment, a convict gang.

This system, by setting up individual qualification against birth, certainly succeeded, in some measure, and on a final analysis, in bringing out another fruitful principle—personality; and it would thus be most unjust to regard the miéstnitchestvo, with Valouiév and some other historians, as an instance of Chinese immobility. The system itself was not unchangeable. It altered in the course of time: it developed; it felt and exercised divers reactions. But though, by its passive resistance, it raised serious obstacles in the path of absolutism, it did not bring any such social or political force to bear as might, by paralyzing its action, have supplied its place, directed or controlled it.

Another force of this nature existed, in embryo at least, in the communal organization to which I have already referred.