Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/70

 46 power. This domain belonged to the 'service men.' It was a private preserve. For in those days any man amenable to justice was still fair game.

But with the following century the scene changes. Communal autonomy suddenly widens its borders. It tends towards the absorption of the whole of the provincial administration, and of all the powers thereto attached. What has happened? This—that the 'service men' have failed in their task. They have worked the land so hard that they have ruined it. By their exactions and extravagance they have not only done serious damage to private interests, for which the State cares little, but they have compromised the interests for which the State does care—they have destroyed or diminished its taxable property. And the State, wavering between the two poles of its own political theory, then in course of evolution, between the current of absolutism and the current of liberty, resolves to break down privileges it has itself conferred, and which have not borne their expected fruit, and withdraws functions the bestowal of which it now regrets. For the discharge of these, it calls on the elements of that communal organization it has long scorned and even misused. Charters, bestowed by a more and more liberal hand, place the communal starosts and wardens in possession of a power tending first to the diminution and then to the suppression of that once held by the lieutenants and bailiffs of the Crown. But for all that, the State does not drop its fundamental programme; it does not quite abdicate its despotism. Between this last, and the spirit of the institutions thus called to play a new part, it seeks a compromise, and finds it in the separation of the authority it concedes from the independence it refuses. These magistrates, whose powers it has increased, will still be functionaries, men of its own, and the commune, thus widened and glorified, will be a State institution—we shall watch this phase—until, under the law of serfdom, the approaching evolution gives it yet another form—the autonomy of the galleys, the association of the chain that binds one pair of legs to another.

To comprehend these successive changes we must devote a closer, though still a cursory, examination to the working of the particular parts of the machine affected by them.

Till towards the middle of the sixteenth century this sphere is wholly ruled by the idea that the administration of justice is a privilege, a valuable asset. Fiscal agents and Crown officers on the 'black lands,' property-owners on the 'white,' all feed or are fed at the same manger. Decrees are pretexts,