The two Ivans had created a new code of laws, and now there was an
ample prison-house for its transgressors! The penal code was
frightful. An insolvent debtor was tied up half naked in a public
place and beaten three hours a day for thirty or forty days, and then,
if no one came to his rescue, with his wife and his children he was
sold as a slave. But Siberia was to be the prison-house of a more
serious class of offenders for whom this punishment would be
insufficient. It was to serve as a vast penal colony for crimes
against the state. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century it is
said one million political exiles have been sent there, and they
continue to go at the rate of twenty thousand a year; showing how
useful a present was made by the robber Yermak to the "Orthodox Tsar"!

This reign, like that of Louis XI. of France, which it much resembled,
enlarged the privileges of the people in order to aid Ivan in his
conflict with his nobility. For this purpose a _Sobor_, or
States-General, was summoned by him, and met at long intervals
thereafter until the time of Peter the First.

Of the two sons left to Ivan by his wife Anastasia, only one now
remained. In a paroxysm of rage he had struck the Tsarevitch with his
iron staff. He did not intend to kill him, but the blow was mortal.
Great and fierce was the sorrow of the Tsar when he found he had slain
his beloved son--the one thing he loved upon earth, and there remained
to inherit the fruit of his labors and his crimes only another child
(Feodor) enfeebled in body and mind, and an infant (Dmitri), the son of
his seventh wife. His death, hastened by grief, took place three years
later, in 1584.