The combination of education and administration had one particular very stabilizing effect upon Chinese society. It made literacy and rulership identical. Every educated man was either a government official or expected to become one. There was no hostile scholar class, no break with the tradition. Struggle between scholars generally took the form of conflicts between cliques and were not founded—except in rare instances—on any cleavage of ideas. The Throne secured its own position and the continuity of the ideology through establishing intellectuality as a government monopoly. The consequences of the educational-administrative system fostered democratic tendencies quite as much as they tended to maintain the status quo. The scholars were all men, and Chinese, owing allegiance to families and to native districts. In this manner a form of representation was assured the government which kept it from losing touch with the people, and which permitted the people to exercise influence upon the government in the advancement of any special interests that could profit by government assistance. The educational system also served as the substitute for a nobility. Hereditary class distinctions existed in China on so small a scale that they amounted to nothing. The way to power was through the educational hierarchy.(45) In a society which offered no financial or military short cuts to power, and which had no powerful nobility to block the way upward, the educational system provided an upward channel of social mobility which was highly important in the organization of the Chinese world order. The scholars, once they had passed the examinations, were given either subsistence allowances or posts, according to the rank which they had secured in the tests. (This was, of course, the theory; in actuality bribery and nepotism played rôles varying with the time and the locality.) They made up the administration of the civilized world. They were not only the officials but the literati.