ception of a very early date made it a thing belonging essentially to the State, which could only be private property within certain limits, and subject to higher rights. The proprietors, on their side, were all in the master hand, and, lacking, as I have already shown, any cohesion or corporate organization, were incapable of making any serious resistance. Their weakness and docility only hastened the development of the system under which they suffered. The most recalcitrant could only hit on one expedient—flight. This has always been a feature in the Russian character. The Russian who finds himself in an unendurable position will always slip out rather than resist. We shall have to follow the historical manifestation of this phenomenon. The peasants, but in far greater numbers, acted on the example thus set them. In their case flight was easier. The vottchinniki and pomiéchtchiki who sought fresh employment in the neighbouring country of Poland were more closely watched and less easily satisfied, and they ran serious risks and chances. But all the peasant had to do was to slip across the south-west frontier, ill-guarded and constantly pushed further afield, and there, in endless spaces, find hospitality on a virgin and untaxed soil.
Therefore, from the earliest years of the sixteenth century, the exodus of the agriculrural population and the abandonment of the soil, left to lie untilled, became the great contemporary fact, a national peril. Then the State, whose pocket was threatened, resolved to interfere. It began with that which seemed most pressing. It would seem—though the assertion is debatable—that in the middle of this century a series of administrative measures and judicial decisions, if not of legislative arrangements, established a fixed system of rating, and thence it resulted that the ratepayers on the 'black' lands belonging to the Court were unable to leave them. For though the tenant was still free to give up his tenancy, he had to pay the same tiaglo, or a higher one, elsewhere. Then came the turn of the 'white' lands held by the 'service men.'
The peasants' flight ruined the pomiéchtchik, and a ruined pomiéchtchik brought poverty on the State. Wherefore the State, without having recourse, as yet, to any general measure, laboured to insure the continuity and yield of its 'service' by means of individual and local arrangements, which, in exceptional cases, authorized certain owners to keep the peasants settled on their land, or force the fugitives back to it.
The policy of Moscow always leaned to this marking out, in the first instance, of a regulation ultimately to become
