The word _efficiency_ betrays the mind of the age which gave it its current connotation. It was a machine-governed mind; and mechanistic conceptions of life and progress are from the nature of the case unfriendly to the democratic spirit. The appearance of the “efficiency engineer” showed the low estate into which man had fallen—man made once a little lower than the angels but now treated as a little lower than the machine. The business of efficiency engineering was the closer subordination of the man to the machine by methods alleged to be scientific. Nothing could show more plainly than this does the absence of that broad humanism which is the very breath of democracy; and even the generous intention of the socialist ideal was vitiated by the mechanistic character of socialist doctrine. Statecraft itself became an affair of efficiency-engineering on a large scale; and the logic of the mechanistic habit of thought reached its fine flower in the merciless regimentation of the German people and the enthronement of the “Great God Gun.” From this pernicious heresy, we may hopefully expect that reflection on our war-experience may deliver us. Already there are manifest signs of a reaction to a healthier and kindlier conception of life and its meaning. The excessive and artificial centralisation of power in the State is being challenged by a demand for the revival of regional culture and such a redistribution of the functions of government as a recognition of the “region” would require.[4] The business of “unscrambling” the egg, will indeed be long and difficult; but it is clear that any advance in the essential humanities is bound up with a release of life from the artificial integrations forced upon it by the machine civilisation. Mr. Delisle Burns has shown us that the essential note of Greek life was its sociability;[5] and this is indeed a pole to which normal human nature ever swings true. But in the Greek city, sociability was vitiated and ultimately destroyed by the tragic schism of a slave-system; while in modern civilisation it has been poisoned by the dominion of the machine. The swamping of the “region” by the state has enfeebled the natural social bonds of a less sophisticated age; and somehow or other democracy must thread its way back to a simpler and more spontaneous sociability. For the artificial synthesis of “the individual and the state,” we must restore the natural order of “myself and my neighbours.” Footnote 4: Upon this subject, see _The Coming Polity_, by Geddes and Branford. (Williams and Norgate.) Footnote 5: In his _Greek Ideals_.