Here’s the paper I’ll deliver on Thursday at the CUNY Grad Center. It needs a rousing conclusion, or maybe not, and I’ll have to cut it in half, approximately, to get it under 10 minutes. That’s OK, the section on Madison can be summarized briefly, and I can condense the long quotes from Diggins on Henry Adams. The weird paragraphs at the end are what I copied and pasted out of Adams, The Tendency of History (1910), which are—or can be treated as—uncannily prescient about the timing of the republic’s demise. I’ll use them in the Q & A if I get a chance. (The capital V is supposed to be the square root symbol.)
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I am glad to be here, at a conference on the intellectual legacy of John Patrick Diggins, whose fearless itinerary took him places very few historians of the US have ventured. I’m here to redeem myself, so my motives are rather self-interested. For the last time I made remarks in public about Jack, it was at a conference right here at the Grad Center, in this very space, and I was anything but gracious, or generous. In fact, I ridiculed the book to which the panel chair had assigned me, The Promise of Pragmatism (1994), on the grounds that, as an intellectual biography of Henry Adams that verged on autobiography (much like Lewis Mumford’s biography of Herman Melville [1929]), it had almost nothing to do with the subject indicated in its title. I was forced, as I saw it, to speculate on the erotic sources of Jack’s loving tribute to Henry. Of course I meant “erotic” in the psychoanalytical sense, as a polymorphous drive in search of a proper muse, not a narrowly sexual urge attached to some particular organ or body.
Nonetheless, I embarrassed myself. And so today, to avoid public humiliation at my own hands, I will stick to the program, as they say. I’m here only to comment The Lost Soul of American Politics, Jack’s brilliant, tragic book of 1984, and to ask how it might speak to our present circumstance, 40 years later, as we face the crisis of popular, republican the Founders saw coming—a constitutional failure, a breakdown of the machinery of government, to be sure, but also the kind of spiritual or social crisis that a host of writers on the Left and Right have detected in the failures of liberalism since roughly 1960, from Sheldon Wolin, Hannah Arendt, C. Wright Mills, Lionel Trilling, and Tom Hayden, to Alastair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Irving Kristol, Carol Pateman, Wendy Brown, Anne Phillips, Judith Butler, John Pocock, and, more recently, Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, Adam Vermeule, Samuel Moyn, and Alan Kahan. In all these accounts, mutuality, morality, obligation, responsibility, solidarity, and virtue are the key words and actionable concepts that liberalism lacks; their uniform question was, and is, how to restore them to their proper place in everyday life and in the conduct of politics, or rather, how to instantiate them in the first place?
In view of Jack’s deep respect for the historical consciousness that informed the thinking of Henry Adams on the American form of government, and just about all else, it seems useful to begin with some remarks on Adams himself, the blueprint of the lost soul which Diggins used to become the old mole of American historiography—the ghost who would haunt us, and taunt us, reminding us of our debts to our founding fathers, but also of their deficiencies, or at least the consequences they didn’t intend.
Adams was the archetypal historian of America because he suffered from an anti-capitalist bias but could not relinquish an unconscious, and therefore inarticulate devotion to bourgeois society and its attendant virtues. This would seem an impossible juxtaposition, an unsustainable contradiction, but it characterizes the sensibilities and methods of almost all students of US history, and perhaps of modern history as such. A moment’s thought on the social movements that have made a difference here—I mean the ones that have sought to maintain the fundamental rights of liberty (of contract and of conscience) as grounded in property by manipulating, modulating, or containing market forces in the name of equality—will, I trust, dispel your doubts on the matter. The first such movement, a template for what followed, was the Great Awakening of the mid-18th century. Its heirs are to be found in the Revolution, the Second Awakening of the 1830s and 40s that produced abolitionism, the woman movement, and temperance, not to mention the Civil War, then the labor movements of the late-19th century, and, finally, the capstone courses in the curriculum, the Populist Moment and the Progressive Era.
The assumptions animating these movements were modern, and liberal, in the sense (1) that they defined civil society, not political participation (citizenship) which is to say they accepted markets, as the setting of self-mastery, self-realization, and self-determination—so liberty presupposed, or meant, in effect, the ownership of oneself; (2) that they believed, accordingly, in the sovereignty of the people, not the state or its officers and agencies; (3) that they understood the individual was the basic, atomic particle of political activity and the object of public policy; so conceived, political participation was just one among many avenues of attaining selfhood, not the only means of realizing individuality; (4) that they knew the inviolable grounding of such individuality, as something achieved rather than ascribed, was the natural right of property; and, most significantly, (5) that they were certain of markets as the guarantee of individuality, thus liberty, but also the warrantee of equality, but only so long as the forces of the market were ubiquitous, anonymous, and unpredictable, because they were perfectly competitive, that is, beyond the control of “unlawful combinations in restraint of trade,” whether these combinations were made of political conspiracy, legal chicanery, or the unnatural persons called corporations.
The bourgeois individual, the more or less Protestant temperament, was the embodiment of these assumptions and the social movements constituted by them. He—this individual was coded as the “man of reason” until the 20th century—believed passionately in liberty, property, and Bentham. He was self-made, self-reliant, ruggedly independent, “free to choose,” and so forth, because he controlled his time, that is, his labor-power was not for sale in the market: his will was free because it was not bent to the purposes of his employer, because he was self-employed, a proprietor of himself.
This individual was born in the Reformation and came of age in the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. He was known for initiative, independence, perseverance, self-restraint, piety, and compliance with the laws and the social norms that valorized the fulfillment of patriarchal duties—in short, he exemplified the bourgeois virtues. These manly virtues were derived from the discipline of work, from mixing his labor with his property and thereby providing for his family, which functioned as both incentive to and social limit of his individual desires.
He was the bulwark of republican government because his will was free from the encumbrance of economic necessity, that is, exempt from the need to comply with the explicit commands or implicit demands of his employer. He did not have to buy the right not to die by selling his labor-time, and with it, his will. Therefore, no one had to dictate moral duties or standards to him: he was his own man, someone whose standard equipment included a conscience. He knew that he was the equal of the men who made the laws, so he could give his consent freely to the laws they made.
Corruption, the degradation of government by its auction to the highest bidder, would not, then, become a problem as long as the majority of the (male) population was composed of these bourgeois individuals whose property kept them from the vicissitudes of the market in labor-power, and so placed them above or at least apart from the realm of necessity, where they could sustain their families as moral bastions against the market, on the one hand, and the state on the other.
The founders understood the problem of sustaining popular, republican government in precisely these terms, as a pending moral cum political problem that could be postponed by policies that would prevent the concentration of property, and thus forestall an oligarchic distribution of power, which, as the most likely result of economic development (the division of labor, etc.) was the most dangerous threat to social order and political stability. James Madison was particularly attuned to it, indeed was convinced that all previous republics had failed because they could not balance the “two cardinal objects of government, the rights of persons and the rights of property.”
Madison believed in the sovereignty of the people as the sine qua non of republican government. But he assumed that the defense of majority rule, and with it the possibility of a legitimate exercise of state power, required a logic that wasn’t circular—a logic that didn’t justify the power of the state, as expressed in law, by reference to power as such, in this instance the power of numbers.
In sum, Madison knew that a majority could be as despotic as any tyrant. What was to be done? How to contain or combat this despotic potential and thus preserve the substance and legitimacy of popular government? Neither a “prudent regard” for the common good nor “respect for character”—for elite opinion—was adequate, according to Madison. But piety was no help, either, because, like other “passions,” it could easily inflame oppressive majorities.
“The conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, the strongest of religious ties, proves that individuals join without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them under the like sanction, separately in their closets. When indeed Religion is kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other Passions, is increased by the sympathy of a multitude.”
The great secret divulged by the history of republican government, Madison had found, was that there was nothing left to learn from that history. Except this: either the rights of persons would be protected from the power of property, or the new American experiment would perish along with all the other attempts at government of, by, and for the people. In other words, either liberty would be sustained by equality, or both would be extinguished by “commerce,” that is, economic development, the division of labor, the concentration of wealth, class conflict, etc.
“In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots & lawgivers the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich. In the existing state of American population & American property, the two classes of rights were so little discriminated that a provision for the rights of persons was supposed to include of itself those of property, and it was natural to infer from the tendency of republican laws, that these different interests would be more and more identified.
“Experience and investigation have however produced more correct ideas on the subject.”
In other words, the study of history has forced a complete departure from classical and modern republican theory, Aristotle to Montesquieu. As he said in the constitutional convention on June 19, 1787, “According to the Republican theory indeed, Right & power being both vested in the majority, are held to be synonymous. According to fact & experience, a minority may in an appeal to force be an overmatch for the majority.”
“It is now observed that in all populous countries, the smaller part only can be interested in preserving the rights of property. It must be foreseen that America, and Kentucky itself will by degrees arrive at this stage of Society, that is some parts of the Union, a very great advance is already made towards it “ (Kentucky was shorthand for the most verdant lands on the trans-Appalachian frontier, a new Garden of Eden.)
“It is well understood that interest leads to injustice as well where the opportunity is presented in bodies of men as to individuals; to an interested majority in a Republic, as to the interested minority in any other form of Government. The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution, and in the present state of population when the bulk of the people have a sufficient interest in possession or in prospect to be attached to the rights of property, without being insufficiently attached to the rights of persons. Liberty not less than justice pleads for the policy here recommended.
“If all power be suffered to slide into hands not interested in the rights of property which must be the case whenever a majority fall under that description, one of two things cannot fail to happen; either they will unite against the other description and become the dupes & instruments of ambition, or their poverty & dependence will render them the necessary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”
So conceived, the problem of modern liberal governance was, and is, the Labor Problem—not human nature, not the lack of virtue, not the absence of piety, not the consequent erosion of respect for character, hierarchy, or tradition. Given the assumptions of modern liberalism in all its variants, that the rights of property are essential to the protection of liberty (of contract and conscience), and that the rights of persons are essential to the protection of equality, the Labor Problem is, simply, how to reconcile these “two cardinal objects of government” in view of the fact that the overwhelming majority of individuals are proletarians with no vested interest in the rights of property except as they may be invoked to enforce bodily autonomy or claim personal possessions.
This is to ask, how to substantiate equality when the normal course of development concentrates the ownership of property and wealth, which, in a market society makes for an unequal distribution of power, thus the diminution of liberty, because fewer and fewer owners of such wealth control more and more resources—including the most precious of all resources, time itself—than the many.
This is the problem that goes missing, the question that goes unasked, in the studies of the American liberal experiment conducted by Alexis de Tocqueville, Henry Adams, and John Diggins.
Adams and Diggins were acutely aware that the development of corporate capitalism made bourgeois individuals an endangered species, and thus hollowed out the social groundwork of republican government. But they also assumed, like the founders and most other Americans, that markets are the necessary if not sufficient condition of both liberty and equality. Neither could then see a way beyond capitalism that wouldn’t compromise or obliterate this condition, which sustained the liberal principles of possessive individualism, the sovereignty of the people, and the equality of all people at the law.
And so they found, and depicted themselves, as caught in the middle of evolutionary stages, somehow outside of or suspended in historical time, neither of them able to embrace or to repudiate socialism, which both viewed as an inevitably statist solution to the massive corruption and moral decrepitude of corporate-industrial capitalism, and thus no less a standing invitation to auction off policies than government under liberal, capitalist auspices.
But Diggins wrote The Lost Soul of American Politics at the dawn of the so-called neo-liberal regime, when the intellectual pressure on liberalism came mainly, almost exclusively, from the Left, at least in its respectable forms (the neo-conservative Irving Kristol, for example, a former socialist, had profound disagreements with Milton Friedman and the Godfather, Friedrich von Hayek). Jack himself was, by his own account, a man of the Left. So the obvious question for us, on the eve of an election that may well prove to be as important as the pundits want us to believe, is, can we recall, or rather resurrect, the soul of American politics as he did, but now as an answer to radical (= reactionary) criticism of liberalism from the Right?
Probably not. I say this hesitantly, not because the authorities he invokes offered their insights in religious idioms or dialects—the speakers are Melville, Lincoln, and Henry Adams—but because, by Jack’s own accounting, the varieties of religious experience are so plural, and so unpredictable, that their consequences are either undecidable, as Melville’s story of Billy Budd would suggest, or they remove us altogether from the scene of politics, as Adams’s retreat to a medieval rendition of Catholic worship would recommend. Only in Lincoln’s words, but not as Diggins interprets them, can we find a way of saying, “you do not have the right to do what is wrong,” and thus avoiding the feckless, ultimately ignominious end of liberalism waiting on the other side of November in 1860, in 1932 (Berlin), and once again in 2024.
Diggins sees in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural a premonition of Adams’s forgiving vision, which was, however, predicated on the “farewell to politics” announced in the novel Democracy (1880). How, then, can a “Christian philosophy of history”—that’s what Diggins attributes to Lincoln—countermand a classic, Machiavellian schema, and thus permit a redemption of liberal politics? Jack begins by tracing Henry’s itinerary of retreat, in words that carry the unmistakable sounds of autobiography, or at least a strong inclination to follow the path Adams blazed through the dark wood of nihilism, on his way to the Virgin:
“Repelled by the corruptions of the Grant administration, Adams became convinced that politics itself had caused the atrophy of the classical idea of virtue even though its language and vocabulary persisted in American political discourse. Indeed, this disjunction of language and reality led Adams to relocate the very spirit of virtue in order to rescue it from the squalid atmosphere of American political life. . . . Adams would surely have agreed with Weber’s perception that capitalist values had so penetrated every layer of society as to render obsolete the classical distinction between political duty and economic activity, public good and private interests. . . . [And so] the more Henry Adams pondered the assumptions of John Adams and his contemporaries, the more he found himself in another universe. . . . Adams judged the American theory of government a ‘failure’; and he believed that the Constitution had, like morality itself, ‘expired,’ because its ‘delusive’ and ‘chimerical’ premises prevented it from doing what the framers specifically intended it to do: control economic power by establishing political authority. . . . Adams took to the study of history not only to escape the present but to better understand it by tracing its origins and development. No less than Machiavelli and Marx, Adams originally aspired to write history in order to endow the world with human significance, . . . [and] he started by assuming that the past could be known by determining the ‘sequence’ of events so that ‘a relation of cause and effect’ could be established. . . . But motive, intent, purposeful action, causal connection—all such concepts seemed to collapse under Adams’s probing mind.” This collapse was of course recorded in the nine volumes of his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889-1891). [pp. 263-67]
What was then to be done? “In The Prince Machiavelli taught that it was better to be feared than loved; in The Federalist Americans were taught how power could be controlled; In Mont-Saint-Michel & Chartres both classical and liberal assumptions are exposed as inadequate. Doubtless Adams’s work is more personal than political, more an aesthetic vision of redemption than an analysis of government and statecraft. But the text contains important political implications, not the least of which is the Christian idea of the regenerating power that lies within love itself. . . . Whatever their differences in regard to the classical heritage, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and the American Founders all accepted religion as a means of political control. . . [because] they wanted man to be kept in fear of divine wrath lest society go to pieces. What makes Mont-Saint-Michel & Chartres such a radical document is that it repudiates this tradition, at least by implication, by offering a religion without a vindictive God.” [pp. 270-71]
How does Diggins square this document with the Second Inaugural? You will recall that after the famous bit about “malice toward none and charity toward all,” Lincoln adopts a more strident, judgmental diction and direction that recapitulate the transition from the forgiving Christ to the vengeful God of Abraham in the last verse of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as Julia Ward Howe wrote it (“In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free”):
“Yet if God wills that it [this ‘mighty scourge of war’] continues until the wealth piled by the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” [cit. p. 328]
Diggins quotes this passage and then, astonishingly, explains it as follows: “Lincoln invokes the will of God, but he does not claim the ability to interpret it . . . . Thus, while [he] makes clear that ‘providence’ may rule, the ultimate significance of its doing so is never made clear. Morality is neither identified with righteousness nor is virtue with victory.” [p.329]
Jack presses on with this preposterous explanation by quoting from Lincoln’s address of a year earlier, which called for a day of fasting and prayer in view of the ongoing slaughter. And here he says something that has nothing to do with the address he quotes, but that does lead us back to the groundwork of Lincoln’s ability to put the issue of slavery beyond compromise, by reducing it to the moral question as it was posed by the abolitionists: “In appealing to spiritual conscience Lincoln was not only exploiting the shame of a nation. He was also bringing ethics to the forefront of politics by demonstrating that moral judgment is embedded in the fabric of history.” [p. 330]
Diggins might have well said that Lincoln was repairing one of the principal failings of liberalism—its inability to acknowledge the weight of the historical past in devising procedural answers to substantive questions, its inability to see ethical principles as residing in and flowing from historical circumstances given by the past, in other words, its inability to see that, Kant notwithstanding, you can, in fact, deduce ought from is. That is Lincoln’s great achievement, his ability to make the moral claims of abolitionism as grounded in the Declaration consistent with the historical development of the American nation as enabled by and inscribed in a Constitution that sanctioned slavery. That is what allowed him to say to slaveholders, who correctly insisted that the Constitution was theirs, “you do not have the right to do what is wrong,” and start a Civil War in the name of preserving a constitutional union.
Here is the paragraph that he used repeatedly in speeches after its debut on October 16, 1854. Notice how the Declaration presides:
“Equal justice to the south, it is said, requires us to consent to the extending of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore, I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes. . . .But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” [Peoria, October 16, 1854: Collected Works 2: 264-66]
But Lincoln’s ironclad devotion to the impending new nation—the one he announced in the Gettysburg Address—was predicated on the rhetorical suture of the Declaration and the Constitution he accomplished in the Cooper Institute speech of February 27, 1860. Here he retold the story of the founding in a way that made these documents moments on a political continuum rather than the objects of an either/or choice, as the abolitionists would have it. Here he showed that the ethical principles inscribed in the Declaration were embodied in the historical circumstances recognized by the Constitution. Here he showed that radicalism and conservatism were complementary political temperaments.
Many jurists had claimed that the Declaration created “the people” invoked in the preamble of the Constitution, so that the latter could not be construed, in Congress or at the law, as a kind of diplomatic compact between sovereign states. These original states had not severally declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, not any more than the delegates in Philadelphia had written the Constitution in 1787 merely to protect the rights of their respective states—“the people” were prior to the Constitution, and the nation was greater than the sum of its parts, its states.
Lincoln clearly invoked this constitutional continuity at Gettysburg. But earlier, at Cooper Institute, he had demonstrated that the Declaration and the Constitution were commensurable documents in terms of their attitudes toward slavery. That is how he both preserved and annulled the claims of slaveholders to a constitutional right in slave property, and in doing so, made the extension of slavery unthinkable.
Lincoln used the Dred Scott decision to hoist Douglas by his own petard. The central question was, “Does the proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our Federal Government to control slavery in our Federal Territories,” as Douglas, the leading sponsor of Popular Sovereignty, held, in agreement with the majority of the Supreme Court? It was a question that could have been answered legalistically, by reference to the decisions of the federal courts. Lincoln chose instead to make the question practical and historical. First he quoted Douglas on what we now call original intent: “Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question [of slavery’s disposition in the territories] just as well, and even better, than we do now.”
Then, having adopted this utterance as his own text, he asked, what was the understanding of those fathers on this very question? He answered by equating their understanding with their actions on the question.
Lincoln painstakingly showed that of the 39 men who had approved or signed the document (over 60 attended the convention), 23 had previously or subsequently acted in some official capacity on the question of slavery in the territories, from the Congress that adopted the Northwest Ordinance in 1784 under the Articles of Confederation to the sixteenth Congress that fashioned the Missouri Compromise in the terms provided by the Constitution. Of these, 21, a clear majority, had demonstrated by their actions that they believed the federal government in some form had the proper authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. So the original intent of the framers undermined the constitutional logic of both Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Senator Stephen A. Douglas.
More to the point, the Constitution was itself an anti-slavery mechanism. It was fully consistent, both in its language and its operation, with the Declaration. For nowhere did the men who wrote it use the word race or negro or even slave—the 3/5 clause referred to “persons,” which at least implied the slaves’ humanity—and rarely did they act as if it was a device by which slavery could, or should, be perpetuated. The ethical principles of anti-slavery found in the Declaration were not abstractions removed from the historical circumstances and compromises of the practical politics enabled by the Constitution. Instead, they were residents of the same edifice.
So, Lincoln did not feel displaced in or from his own time, as our lost souls, these old moles Adams and Diggins did. He practiced a kind of originalism, adhering closely to the texts that constituted the American nation in every sense that matters. For he knew that we, us Americans, have nothing in common except those texts—we don’t share a national origin, a religious affiliation, a linguistic affinity, a racial composition. The color line is real, but it is artificial, and so it is always already in motion: it’s what we make of it. To be an American is to argue about what it mean to be an American.
If there is a lost soul of American politics, it’s not, therefore, to be found in the Christian philosophy of history Jack Diggins attributed to Lincoln. Unless we’re willing to go along with old Walt Whitman, the poet who declared that “only Hegel is fit for America.” For, as Josiah Royce understood, the “unhappy consciousness” at the heart of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was a mighty Protestant rendition of what William James called a variety of religious experience.
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[The Owl of Minerva had already spread its wings by the time Melville composed these lines: “The vast reserves, the untried fields,/These shall long keep off and delay/ The class war, the rich and poor man fray.” That’s from Clarel, the poem of 1876.]
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Henry Adams, The Tendency of History:
“[Suppose the Mechanical Phase] lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to V 300, or about seventeen years and a half, when—that is, in 1917—it would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only V 17.5, or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be! Nothing whatever is beyond the range of possibility; but even if the life of the previous phase, 1600-1900, were extended another hundred years, the difference to the last term of the series would be negligible. In that case, the Ethereal Phase would last till about 2025. “ [p.172]
“In one respect his [the historian’s] dilemma is worse than in the sixteenth century, since Bacon's physical teaching aimed at freeing the mind from a servitude, while the law of Entropy imposes a servitude on all energies, including the mental. The degree of freedom steadily and rapidly diminishes. Without rest, the physicists gently push history down the decline, as yet scarcely conscious, which they are certain to plot out by abscissae and ordinates as soon as they can fix and agree upon a sufficient number of normal variables, not with conscious intention but by unconscious extension. Every reader of current literature knows that the subject is touched by half the books he reads, and that the most popular are the most outspoken. Few volumes are more widely known than M. Gustave Le Bon's ‘Physiologie des Foules’ (1895), which closes with the following paragraph:
"‘That which formed a people, a unity, a block, ends by becoming an agglomeration of individuals without cohesion, still held together for a time by its traditions and institutions. This is the phase when men, divided by their interests and aspirations, but no longerknowing how to govern themselves, ask to be directed in their smallest acts; and when the State exercises its absorbing influence. With the definitive loss of the old ideal, the race ends by entirely losing its soul; itbecomes nothing more than a dust of isolated individuals, and returns to what it was at the start,—a crowd.’" [117-18]