(2) Too much legislation stifles individuality, drags genius down to the dead level of average ideas, tends to produce an unprogressive uniformity of practice.  It imposes the conceptions of the past upon the future.  “If the measures have any effect at all, the effect must in part be that of causing some likeness among the individuals; to deny this is to deny that the process of molding is operative.  But in so far as uniformity results advance is retarded.  Every one who has studied the order of nature knows that without variety there can be no progress."[Footnote:  H. Spencer, op. cit, sec. 138.] “Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.  Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. ...  It is important to give the freest scope possible to uncustomary things, in order that it may in time appear which of these are fit to be converted into customs.” [Footnote:  J. S. Mill, On Liberty, chap.  III.] But the intention of social legislation is to check only such individual action as is demonstrably detrimental; the uniformity produced will be only a uniform absence of flagrant wrongs and adoption of such positive precautions as will make the detection and checking of these harmful acts easy.  Beyond this minimum uniformity (which, however, must include an enormous number of details, so manifold have the possibilities of wrongdoing become) there will on any system be ample range for the development of new methods and processes.  Whatever danger there once was in choking individual initiative by needlessly paralyzing restrictions, will be, in the long run, negligible in an age of omnivorous reading and free discussion, and in a land whose conscious ideal is improvement, new invention, progress.  As a matter of fact, it is chiefly through legislation that new methods of social practice become diffused.  Each of our forty-eight States is experimenting in social guidance, trying to thwart this or that sin, to remedy this or that wrong, to work out a plan by which men can happily cooperate in our complex public life.  The process of evolving an efficient and frictionless social machine, instead of being retarded by this activity of lawmaking, is actually accelerated thereby.  Private business tends to fall into ruts; and one man’s ideals are blocked by lack of cooperation from others.  Legislation tends not only to preserve the best of past experiments; but, goaded by the zeal of reformers, and pushed by political parties, to drag complacent and inert individuals along new and untried paths.  The greatest field for genius lies today in devising successful constructive legislation; and the greatest hope for progress in this era of mutual dependence lies in the winning of a majority for some social scheme that must be generally adopted if at all.