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 246 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ized hierarchically and graded in respect to responsibilities, emoluments, and honors. All along this staircase, excepting perhaps a few steps at the very top reserved for the Shermans and Von Moltkes, promotion is very closely bound up with suc- cessful leadership. The officer who can animate his men to the greatest efforts, win them for the boldest enterprises, nerve them for the heaviest shocks, is deemed of highest value, and is advanced towards ever higher prizes. Such a service, there- fore, establishes a perpetual market where personal ascendency can be disposed of to the best advantage.

The state has always been another field for the profitable employment of natural mastership. The steady authority polit- ical organs can count on now is a rather recent thing. The time was when a success of government was very much bound up with the personal authority of those who officered the state. Not great administrators like Stephan or Cromer, nor yet great statesmen like Pitt or Cavour, welded the modern state out of the fragments of power provided by feudalism. This was in part the work of heroes, of kings and the ministers of kings, who eked out the scanty royal authority with their personal dominion. Through most of its history the state has been a hierarchy of places and prizes to go to those most able to make their wills prevail over those of other men.

Even in the rigid articulated mechanism of the "legal state" personal ascendency is not yet a quantite neglige able. All the time considerable changes are taking place in the partition of power between government and citizen and in its distribution among the men who compose the government. Despite its statutory framework, an office bulges when filled by the man of command, shrinks when occupied by mediocrity. Recognizing as he must all these warping influences that make the real state so unlike the edifice of the theorist, it is still certain that the general will behind the political mechanism prevails more and more over the personalities that constitute its parts.

The church relies much more than the state upon manipula- tion of the feelings because it has no bailiffs or constables at its