general and definite. Towards the middle of the century two charters, granted to the brothers Stroganov, marked a decisive step forward on this road. They stipulated that the concessionnaires should seize and send back such peasants as might seek refuge, in their flight, on the huge domains they proposed to colonize in that far-away land of uncultivated steppes to which the current which was sapping the economic prosperity and military organization of the country had turned its course.
It has been further supposed that a general law, passed in the middle of the sixteenth century, suppressed the right of free exodus in the case of a certain class of peasants, the starojiltsy, or husbandmen settled for many years on the land they worked. But Monsieur Serguiéiévitch, disagreeing with Monsieur Diakonov and several other historians ('Antiq. Jur.,' iii., p. 460, etc.), has finally refuted this hypothesis. The questions of labour and rating were the only ones which played a decisive part in the matter, and prepared the birth of the monster called Kriépostnoïé pravo, the law of serfdom. One slavery involved another, and the 'service man,' shut up in his iron cage, forced it on the peasant, soon to be followed by the merchant and even the Churchman. We have seen that there was no distinction, in this country, between the urban and the rural populations. Here, again, is an abyss which parts the Russia of the sixteenth century from the rest of Europe.
VII.—The Townsfolk.
In the West, the progress of trade and industry led to the organization of the townsfolk into corporations, which armed themselves to withstand feudalism. In the bosom of these associations, in the mutual relations of their members, was elaborated that spirit of liberty from which the institutions of communal autonomy sprang, and that material and intellectual activity which evolved the higher forms of economic existence—the creation of capital, the establishment of credit, and the most elevated forms of cultured life, science, art, and society.
Russia has known nothing of this kind, and the absence of these centres of social life and resistance has contributed, more than any other reason, perhaps, to the maintenance and confirmation of the despotic organization imposed upon the country. Trade was restricted, manufactures hardly existed, and consequently the Russian town was not the natural outcome of their development. For long, as their name shows us—gorody means places that are ogorojennyié,
