_Raw Materials, Minerals and Metals_: Bernard M. Baruch, financier. _Engineering and Education_: Doctor Hollis Godfrey, President of the Drexel Institute. _Labor, including Conservation of Health and Welfare of Workers_: Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor. _Medicine and Surgery, including General Sanitation_: Doctor Franklin Martin, Secretary-General of the American College of Surgeons. The Director of the Council and the Advisory Commission during the greater part of the war was Walter S. Gifford, now Vice-President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, a most capable organizer, who with the writer had been closely associated with Howard Coffin in a pioneer industrial preparedness movement inaugurated in the spring of 1916 to examine into the capacity of industrial plants for military purposes. This was an entirely volunteer movement of business men and industrial engineers under the Naval Consulting Board of the United States, acting with the full approval of the President and the War and Navy Departments. Mr. Coffin's Committee on Industrial Preparedness did a remarkable job in a very short space of time, and the creation of the Council of National Defense was the logical sequence of the Committee's work, its records being turned over to the Council. The writer was the Secretary of the Council and the Advisory Commission throughout until the early summer of 1918, when he became Acting Director, succeeding Mr. Gifford shortly after the signing of the armistice. [Illustration: Copyright by Harris & Ewing =United States Council of National Defense and Its Advisory Commission= Seated, left to right: David F. Houston, Secretary of Agriculture; Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy; Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War; Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior; William B. Wilson, Secretary of Labor. Standing, left to right: Grosvenor B. Clarkson, Secretary, later Director, of both Council and Advisory Commission; Julius Rosenwald, Bernard M. Baruch, Daniel Willard, Chairman of the Advisory Commission; Dr. Franklin Martin, Dr. Hollis Godfrey, Howard E. Coffin and Walter S. Gifford, Director of the Council and Advisory Commission.] PROPOSALS OF THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE Although the Council and Advisory Commission did not, as has been stated, make permanent organization until March 3, 1917, the Advisory Commission on December 7, 1916, determined on the following proposals of action: To begin immediately a study to determine the most effective flexible organization and mechanism for the securing of all necessary information and for the clarifying, recording, and classifying of such information when secured.