Many refused to incur this pecuniary sacrifice; others were too or to make it. In this respect, the course of the Upper and Lower Oka seems to have divided the country into two distinct regions. On the northern side, the population, thicker and more industrious, showed an inclination to accept the reform. On the southern, the resources of the people, material and moral, were too poor to permit of their welcoming it. A more general application of the principle might, indeed, have resulted from a development of prosperity, and coincided with the progress of communal existence; but this progress was soon to be compromised and stifled by the law of serfdom, while the Government, impelled by the bureaucratic system maintained in certain provinces, and strongest of all at the central point, was itself to intervene, and warp the working of the new institutions. In fact, from the close of the sixteenth century onwards, the goobnyié starosty, in the very places where they had been called into active existence, were to find themselves converted into mere officials appointed by Government, and dependent on its offices at Moscow.
Ivan's abortive attempt, as I have just sketched it, bears a pretty close resemblance to the reform which called the urban communes of France into life, under Philippe-Auguste and St. Louis, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a yet closer one to that movement in the tenth and eleventh centuries which, through the charters granted to certain associations of serfs belonging to a feudal lord, resulted in the formation of the rural communes. The difference between the general processes of evolution, tending in one case to the complete enfranchisement of the classes, and in the other to their more and more complete servitude, differentiates the two phenomena. The Russian peasants, already, when Ivan claimed to use their instincts of independence for his projected scheme of reorganization, more or less deeply plunged into servitude, turned their backs on this ideal. Between the kriépostnoié pravo and self-government no compromise was possible.
Ivan also imitated Edward I. of England by putting the administration of justice and police matters into the hands of the gentry. But while in England, both in theory and in practice, the responsibility and the privilege were bound together, in Russia the two terms were to be practically separated. Whether it was that the peasant class failed to supply candidates for the pseudo-autonomous functions offered, or that the Government did not care to find them in that class, the privilege fell to the 'men who served,' in that the choice of the electors found nobody else on whom it might fall. Thus, the peasants' share ended by being all duty and no rights. And the sloojilyié themselves soon found theirs too heavy.
