Against All Odds
By Adam Hochschild

Strangely, in a city where it seems that on every block a blue-and-white glazed plaque commemorates a famous event or resident, none marks this spot. All you can see today, after you leave the Bank station of the London underground, walk a block or two east, and then take a few steps into a courtyard, is a couple of low, nondescript office buildings, an ancient pub, and, on the site itself, 2 George Yard, a glass-and-steel high-rise. Nothing remains of the bookstore and printing shop that once stood here, or recalls the late afternoon in 1787 when a dozen people-a somber-looking crew, one man in clerical black and most of the others not removing their high-crowned blade hats-filed through its doors and sat down to launch one of the most far-reaching citizens' movements of all time. Cities build monuments to kings and generals, not to people who once gathered in a bookstore. And yet what these particular citizens did was felt across the world-winning the admiration of the first and greatest student of what today we call civil society. What they accomplished, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, was "something absolutely without precedent in history.... If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt that you will find anything more extraordinary."

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