Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/418

 execution without this detailed knowledge. In Russia this is a prevailing condition, and it is especially encouraged by the method of filling offices which is followed there. Promotion occurs according to grade in the official hierarchy, but not necessarily within the same branch of the service. When, on the contrary, one has reached a certain official class, at his own wish or that of his superior he may be transferred with the same rank to an entirely different branch of the service. It is consequently a not infrequent occurrence that a graduated student, after six months of military service at the front, becomes an officer, without further preparation; while an officer, on the other hand, by transfer into the civil grade corresponding with his military rank, may secure a more promising position in the civil service. How, without training for their new duties, they shall adapt themselves to the changed relations, is their own affair. With inevitable frequency, therefore, the higher official lacks technical knowledge appropriate to his position, and this makes him quite as inevitably dependent upon a subordinate and his knowledge of affairs. This reciprocity of superiority and inferiority often causes the one who is actually conducting the business to seem the subordinate, while he who only executes what the other directs seems the superior. The consequences are no less unfavorable to compactness of organization than appropriately apportioned alternation of superiority and inferiority would be productive of the same.

I come now to the discussion of a further characteristic of relations of superiority and inferiority, viz., that which is imparted to the group by subsidiary relations between the elements so connected. Whether the persons so connected are near to each other or far apart, whether they manifest likenesses or unlikenesses, imparts to the superiority and inferiority existing between them definite consequences and shadings. Thus among the essential distinguishing signs of sociological formations is whether a group preferably subordinates itself to a stranger or to one of its own members. Subordination to one who has emerged from the same circle, and is essentially no more than the equal of