34 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Buddhism. 1 Our hundred years of community-making on the western frontier is eloquent as to the part played by the active few in maintaining the ideals and standards elaborated in older communities. In the days before the railroad the conquest of the American wilderness forced upon the pioneers an isolation which favored a return to the primitive practices of struggle, revenge, and feud. The actual development of law and amity within these communities was mainly the work of the circuit riders of bench, bar, and pulpit, whose special training fitted them to assert the superior canons of a highly cultivated society. The winning of the West was in fact one vast, now almost forgotten, missionary enterprise, in which men standing firmly on the great traditions of law and religion contended with crime and sin. Moral laxity as well as political insub- ordination have characterized the bulk of our frontiersmen, and the warfare against gambling, horse-racing, fighting, and loose sex relations has usually been waged by the few. The great stiffen- ing in the standards of morality and decency in Kentucky at the beginning of this century was due to the Methodist and Baptist preachers. 2 The temperance and anti-liquor movements likewise have originated in the apostolic zeal of clergymen and missionaries. 3
Just as a dam is strongest when it is built on the V plan, so the champions of a superior ethos have the greatest resisting power to popular inclinations when they are organized into a hierarchy. When they are few in number their only hope of success lies in forming themselves into a solid corps, cherishing distinctive ideals and standards, and closed against the crude influences coming from the mass it works upon. The Jewish scribes were able to uphold their noble Deuteronomic Code in
1 See FIELDING, The Soul of the People, chapters on " War " and " Monkhood."
2 See ROOSEVELT, The Winning of the West, Vol. IV, p. 249 ; and McMASTER, History of the People of the United States, Vol. II, pp. 577 ff.
3 In the Kentucky mountains the prohibitory laws " grew out of a popular reac- tion against the uncertain, lawless, terrifying regime of whisky and bloodshed. Tht conviction gradually gained ground that liquor was the source of the evil. In creating this feeling missionaries and temperance workers took an important part." (VINCENT, "A Retarded Frontier," AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, July, 1898.)
