Where was he to find them? Except when, more concerned about their own privileges than the common weal, they were losing battles through fighting over their respective places, or making compacts with the enemy, the men melted into space. As to money, the same men, either as heads of the administration or holders of the soil, chief wealth of the country, disposed of that, keeping its use or control in their own hands. Whether as voiévodes, lieutenants, judges, members of the Supreme Court, chiefs of the various offices, they were everywhere, held everything, except when, on the ancient vottchiny, where each had his own court and his own soldiery, exercised a jurisdiction which was almost without appeal, and refused to pay taxes, almost without exception, they were putting on kingly airs, or else claiming theoretically superior titles, and putting forward pretensions against those of the 'younger branch' at Moscow, which, empty and void as they were for all future purposes, were worrying enough, nevertheless.
As to breaking up the system of his administrative and military organization, Ivan could not dream of such a thing. The life of sixteenth-century Moscow resided in her traditions. Over individuals, the Tsar's power was unlimited; but it failed in face of an order of things of which he himself, his rank, his prestige, and his authority, were integral parts. While the Princes and boïars, accustomed to look on the government of the country as their own property, a sphere belonging to them by prescriptive right, regarded their functions as independent of any investiture on his part, and considered the Miéstnitchestvo a guarantee for this hereditary privilege, the Sovereign found it difficult to say them nay, seeing his own power had the same origin, and was founded on the same title. All these descendants of Rurik or Guedymin, boïars and Tsar alike, had ruled in Russia in the old days—each man apart, on his own appanage. The Government was collective now—one man on the throne, the others at the head of an office or a province. But none the less were they all members of the same company, of the same faimly, and no man of them had any right to say, 'This house is mine, you must go out of it!' And as far as the individuals were concerned, how would Ivan have filled their places? The dozen of men, such as Skouratov and Griaznoï, whom he succeeded in pushing into the foremost rank, after Sylvester and Adachev had disappeared, 'taking them out of the mud,' as he said himself, and generally out of that class of the Popovitchy (sons of popes) which still plays so prominent a part in what is called 'intelligence' in Russia, could not furnish him with the capital, material and moral, represented by the others. Outside the ranks of that aristocracy with which his policy had
