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36 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
collective body may hold is necessarily few ; they carry so much
\ the more force for being limited in number.
p-^ Any unorganized association of individuals bound together by common opinions, sentiments, or desires and too numerous for each to maintain personal relations with the others constitutes a public in the broadest sense of the term. This association may take the form of a crowd, in which the individuals are always in physical contact, or the individuals may be scattered over the entire country, or indeed the world, in which case the association is purely intellectual, there being no corporate proximity between the members.^ This latter is a public in the narrower or proper sense. All crowds are publics in the broader sense but it is to be noted that not all aggregations of individuals are crowds.^ There might be a thousand persons accidentally assembled together on a busy street corner without any common opinion, sentiment, or desire. Such a group could not properly be called a crowd. Crowds are a much older and earlier phenomenon than publics proper. Animals and primitive men are capable of forming crowds but not publics; physical contact is necessary with them to preserve the bond of association. One of the essential con- ditions for the formation of any public is the sense of actuality among the individuals. This is greatly assisted by physical con- tact, which distinguishes crowds. In the absence of physical contact it is difficult to obtain a sense of actuality. This difficulty is increased by distance or lapse of time. Hence extensive publics date from a comparatively recent period. Not until means of communication attained a high stage of development could the purely intellectual bond of association be maintained at great dis- tances. The sense of solidarity and unity necessary to a public was entirely lacking among individuals scattered over a larger area than a parish or a township before the invention of printing, and not until the construction of the railways and the invention of the telegraph did it become possible to multiply the number of these intellectual publics. At the beginning of the French Revo- lution publics were very contracted and feeble. The political
' G. Tarde, L' Opinion et la Foule, 1901, chap. i. • Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1903.
