Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/50

 36 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

formed into the solid wedge of an administrative hierarchy. Japan could never have been reformed so rapidly on western lines but for the leverage the reformers enjoyed in the civil and educational hierarchy. In the Mohammedan world aloofness is a condition of all leadership. Of the judges in a Tunisian divan a traveler says :

To my eye, accustomed to the swarthy Bedawys with heads and legs turned copper color by the bronzing sun of Africa, the delicate skins, fair as a child's, of these men, presented a most suggestive contrast, denoting as it does the studious seclusion of their lives, the days and nights spent in ponder- ing over the Koran, and its code, a seclusion from which they never emerge, save to deal justice to the people out of the stored wisdom of their illumi- nated minds. 1

The apexed hierarchy that like a triangular bracket support- ing a mantel holds up the moral platform upon which a people lives is usually in exclusive possession of a tradition embodying the ethical elements that have been contributed by the prophets and the elite of the past. Now and then, it is true, history shows us a society where the sacred book is in the hands of the com- mon man. But for the most part the stream of inspired or revealed wisdom does not run by the beaten highways so that all may repair to it. The literature that preserves and transmits the superior ideals and standards constitutes a special learning beyond the common ken. This literature the hierarchy guards with care, and studies with zeal. Close and protracted contact with it is the sine qua non on which new blood is admitted to the hierarchy. While its young recruits in the rabbinical schools or the priestly seminaries or the church colleges, or the law classes, are acquiring the requisite learning they are at the same time being formed in such fashion that when they become leaders there will be no sagging or gravitating toward the inferior folk ethos.

The specialized minority, then, that constantly radiates ethical stimuli into the uninstructed mass may group itself in two ways. It may be made up of the accredited possessors of traditional learning, distinguished by common estimation into greater or lesser according to degree of proficiency. As

'MRS. GREVILLE-NUGENT, The Land of Mosques and Marabouts, p. 179.