Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/51

 SOCIAL CONTROL 37

examples of this loose organization, we may instance the scribes and Pharisees among the Jews, the clergy of the Reformed churches, the doctors and teachers of Roman law in the Middle Ages, and the learned clan that exercises authority in law, morals, and theology among the Mohammedans. Or, passing over to a more rigid organization, the minority may present a careful gra- dation of the holders of lucrative or honorific places, bound together as superior and inferior by relations of authority and obedience, and deriving the principle of appointment and pro- motion wholly from within. Something of this kind we find in the Roman Catholic hierarchy, in the Russian Orthodoxy and Russian bureaucracy, and in the educational hierarchies that (I fear we must confess it) are growing up in certain of our modern states.

What the official hierarchy can do is to pitch high the stand- ards of order, decency, and justice, and to hold them stubbornly against all debasing influences. What it frequently does is to reshape them in its own interest until the means of social control degenerate into instruments of class control. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, for instance, becomes a means of getting money out of the people like the papacy of the later Middle Ages, or the tool of a foreign domination like the Spanish church in old Mex- ico, or the prop of petty despots like the Lutheran churches of sixteenth-century Germany, or the instrument of absolutism like the Orthodox church in Russia, or the supple ally of a govern- ing aristocracy like the Church of England from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century.

What must be done in such cases is to smash the machine and put things into the hands of a genuine elite recruited freely from the people, and unspoiled by class spirit. The ethical ele- ments will then be brought into line with healthy ethical senti- ment and with the common welfare. In the department of religious control, for instance, the most perfect identity of God's requirements with conscience and reason is found in those demo- cratic sects where the yoke borne by the faithful is mainly of their own making. In the Reformed churches there has been an unmistakable tendency to drop requirements that have no

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