view to their future usefulness in times of peace. In this
letter, President Wilson said:

"Your State, in extending the national defense organization
by the creation of community councils, is in my opinion
making an advance of vital significance. It will, I believe,
result when thoroughly carried out in welding the Nation
together as no nation of great size has been welded before.
It will build up from the bottom an understanding and
sympathy and unity of purpose and effort which will no doubt
have an immediate and decisive effect upon our great
undertaking. You will find it, I think, not so much a new
task as a unification of existing efforts, a fusion of
energies now too much scattered and at times somewhat
confused into one harmonious and effective power. It is only
by extending your organization to small communities that
every citizen of the State can be reached and touched with
the inspiration of the common cause."

The organization of community councils was actively pushed by the
National and State Councils of Defense, and thousands of them were
organized. This was in the summer of 1918, but owing to the early
declaration of the Armistice they had but little opportunity to become
thoroughly established. As they had been created primarily for war
purposes, most of them ceased to function with the cessation of
hostilities, but the idea had taken root and the experience of common
effort in war activities had brought about a new sense of the value of
some sort of community organization.

2. _The Process of Community Organization._--As corollaries of the
motives for community organization which we have just discussed, there
are certain fairly obvious principles concerning the process of
organization which deserve emphasis.

The first essential is to determine whether there are unsatisfied
desires which cannot be met except by community action and whether they
are sufficiently desired to command the united support of the community.
Only as individuals and associations have common desires which cannot be
satisfied without their united activity can community organization be
effected. The mere logical desirability of coordination of effort,
however rational it may appear, is too abstract an objective to inspire
enduring devotion. The allaying of antagonisms between special interests
makes no appeal to any of them until they are