The decennium extending from 1550 to 1560 was the good period of Ivan IV.'s reign, when he deliberately broke away from his disreputable past and surrounded himself with good men of lowly origin.
The succeeding decennium is the culminating period of Scottish Presbyterianism, when, having successfully resisted the crown, it not only was supreme in Scotland but exercised a decisive influence over England.
The greater part of this is debitable, as just pointed out, to the first year, in which the mortality, calculated upon the number of births, ranged, in the decennium 1895-1904, between 70 per mille, in the exceptionally favourable circumstances of the Australasian States, to nearly 270 in European Russia.