Page 2263 - war-and-peace

receives orders for these actions from men above him; he
himself never gives an order. The noncommissioned officers
(of whom there are fewer) perform the action itself less fre-
quently than the soldiers, but they already give commands.
An officer still less often acts directly himself, but com-
mands still more frequently. A general does nothing but
command the troops, indicates the objective, and hardly
ever uses a weapon himself. The commander in chief never
takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives general
orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops.
A similar relation of people to one another is seen in ev-
ery combination of men for common activityin agriculture,
trade, and every administration.
And so without particularly analyzing all the contigu-
ous sections of a cone and of the ranks of an army, or the
ranks and positions in any administrative or public busi-
ness whatever from the lowest to the highest, we see a law by
which men, to take associated action, combine in such rela-
tions that the more directly they participate in performing
the action the less they can command and the more numer-
ous they are, while the less their direct participation in the
action itself, the more they command and the fewer of them
there are; rising in this way from the lowest ranks to the
man at the top, who takes the least direct share in the action
and directs his activity chiefly to commanding.
This relation of the men who command to those they
command is what constitutes the essence of the conception
called power.
Having restored the condition of time under which all

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