But even this is not enough. There will never be liberty in any state where there is an excessive concentration of power at the centre. The need for a wide conference of authority away from that centre becomes more obvious with the growth of our experience. If the decisions to be made are to embody the needs of those affected by them, the latter must have major responsibility for their making. All of our problems are not central problems; and to leave to the central government the decision of questions which affect only a portion of the community is to destroy in that portion the sense of responsibility and the habit of inventiveness. The inhabitants of any given area have a consciousness of common purposes, a sense of the needs of their neighbourhood, which only they can fully know. They find that the power to satisfy them of themselves gives to them a quality of vigour far greater in the happiness it produces than would be the case if satisfaction were always provided by, or controlled from, without. For administration from without always lacks the vitalizing ability to be responsive to local opinion; it misses shades and expressions of thought and want which are urgent to successful government. It lacks the genius of place. It does not elicit creative support from those over whom it rules. It makes for mechanical uniformity, an effort to apply similar rules to unsimilar things. It is too distant from the thing to be done to awaken interest from those concerned in the process of doing it. Centralized government in local matters may be more efficient than a decentralized system; but that superior efficiency will never, as Mill long ago pointed out, compensate for an inferior interest in the result. I believe, therefore, that, with all its difficulties and dangers, the area of local government should be as little circumscribed as possible. The German system, of laying down what a local authority may not do, and leaving it free to experiment outside that realm of prohibition, seems to me superior both in principle and result to its Anglo-American antithesis. Thereby we gain not only the knowledge which comes from varied social experiment, but the freedom born of citizenship trained in the widest degree to think for itself and to solve its own problems. Most imposed solutions of a uniform character only succeed where their material is genuinely uniform. That is rarely the case in these matters. And even the impatient reformer ought sometimes to think whether, say, forcing a child-labour law on Georgia by federal amendment will lead to a genuine and whole-hearted application of its terms; whether, in fact, it will not persuade to hatred of the law, even contempt for the law, by encouraging evasion of it. Successful legislation is almost always legislation for which the minds of men are anxious; the channels of assent to it can rarely be dug too deep.