SOCIAL CONTROL 247
beck and call. Denied power over the body, it must ply all the more skillfully those great instruments of "spiritual" ascend- ency religion, ideals, and personality. Of the last a perpetual capital is already provided in the person of the founder. In the Christian or the Buddhist church, if anywhere, is verified Emer- son's saying that an institution is a lengthened shadow of one- man. Moreover, through the church, society is beneficiary of the control exercised by a corps of inspired, consecrated, over- mastering, uplifting persons whose influence it may accept but could under no circumstances buy. But social order can profit, not alone from a Ballington Booth or a Phillips Brooks, but can even make use of unconsecrated personalities. In the more centralized churches, just as in army and state, we have a hier- archy of places and prizes in which the principle of ascent is the power to sway men and a willingness to sway them in a cer- tain direction. How often the self-seeker with "power and will to dominate" enlists in the ecclesiastical corps for the "heaven's incense," the "Greek busts, Venetian paintings, Roman walls, and English books" of a Bishop Blougram the Life of Manning gives us a hint. The democratic tendency to do away with steep gradations in the prizes of state and church is a sign that society, having opened up new sources of control, need no longer bid so desperately for personal influence. On the whole I conclude that personal ascendency will play no such role in the future as it has in the past. Unless human- ity surrenders the idealistic basis upon which more and more the control of its members rests, personality will remain as now a valuable auxiliary to political and moral authority, but not the corner stone of social order. In our days the Carlylean "gos- pel of great men" leads chiefly to nothing better than the apotheosis of such pinchbeck heroes as Cecil Rhodes and " Doc- tor Jim."
KhWAKM A I SWOKTH ROSS.
STANFORD UMVK.RXII\. California.
