No definite rules were laid down covering the manner of choosing delegates to the congress. Despite the consequent possibility that the elections of delegates would be manipulated by the less scrupulous Spartacans and Independents, the congress chosen was a remarkably representative body. The numerical weakness of the two radical wings of Socialism found striking illustration in the makeup of the congress. Of its total membership of some four hundred and fifty, the Spartacans and Independents together had only about forty delegates. That this accurately represented the proportionate strengths of the conservative and the radical camps was proved at the elections for the national assembly a month later, when the Independents, with four per cent of the total popular vote, again had one-eleventh of the Majority Socialists' forty-four per cent. In considering the role played by the radicals in the second phase of the revolution it must be remembered that the majority of their strength lay in Berlin, where they eventually won a greater following than that of the old party. If Berlin and the free cities of Hamburg and Bremen could have been isolated from the empire and allowed to go their own way, ordered government in Germany would have come months sooner.[56] [56] It is not merely in very recent times that the largest cities have become the strongholds of radicalism. In a session of the Prussian Diet on March 20, 1852, a deputy charged the government with lack of confidence in the people. Bismarck replied: "The deputy having declared here that the government distrusts the people, I can say to him that it is true that I distrust the inhabitants of the larger cities so long as they let themselves be led by self-seeking and lying demagogues, but that I do not find the real people there. If the larger cities rise up again in rebellion, the real people will have ways of bringing them to obedience, even if these must include wiping them off the face of the earth." The following account of the sessions of the central congress is copied from the author's diary of those days. There is nothing to add to or take from the estimates and comments set down at that time. "December 16th. The Central Congress of Germany's Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils convened today in the _Abgeordnetenhaus_ (Prussian Diet). There are about four hundred and fifty delegates present, including two women. There is a fair sprinkling of intelligent faces in the crowd, and the average of intelligence and manners is far above that of the Berlin Soldiers' Council. None of the delegates keeps his hat on in the chamber and a few who have started smoking throw their cigars and cigarettes away at the request of the presiding officer, Leinert from Hanover, who was for some years a member of the Prussian Diet and is a man of ability and some parliamentary training.