For they will protest against what they regard as the invasion of their rights, and tribute will have to be paid to their protest. In any community, fortunately for ourselves, power is always upon the defensive; and when men are vigilant to expose its encroachments it is urgent to seek their good opinion. Those active-minded enough to fight for their rights will, doubtless, be always in a minority; but they prick the indifferent multitude into thought and they thus act as the gadflies of liberty. The handful of American lawyers who protested against the methods of the Department of Justice in 1920 forced its officials to a change of their ways. The little group of men who, in season and out of season, have protested that the white man’s burden ought not, in justice, to be borne by the black, have the Mandates’ system of the League of Nations to their credit: what E. D. Morel did for the Congo, what H. W. Nevinson did for Portuguese Angola, these are lessons in the service of citizenship to liberty. And it is the peculiar value of this habit of mind that it grows by what it feeds on. To accustom the average man to regard himself as a person who must be consulted is, in the long run, to assure him, through consultation, of satisfaction. For the holders of power are always desirous of finding the convenient routine; and if they are driven by pressure to give the people freedom, they will discover that this is the object they have set before themselves. Into the institutional pattern which such a federalization of authority requires I cannot here enter.[25] It must suffice to say that it makes totally inadequate the traditional forms even of the democratic state. For the notion that, when the citizen has chosen his representatives for Parliament or his local authority, he can sit back in the comfortable knowledge that his wants are known, his interests safeguarded, has not one jot of evidence to support it. We need, of a certainty, a much more complex scheme. We have not only to provide for more adequate relationships between Parliament and the administrative process; we have also to integrate the latter with the public it serves on a much ampler scale than any we have hitherto imagined. I have elsewhere tried to show how vital in this context is the device of the advisory committee. Its value both as a check upon bureaucracy, and as a means of making decision genuinely representative in character, becomes the more clear the wider our experience of its functioning.