The competent people—that is to say, the professional people—are, on the other hand, either physically or in imagination, abroad most of the time. They live in the city—in their offices and in their clubs. They go home to sleep. Most of our residential suburbs tend to assume, as far as the professional classes are concerned, the character of dormitories. It is seldom that anyone who is sufficiently eminent or sufficiently competent to find a place in _Who’s Who_ has time for anything more than a benevolent interest in his local community. On the other hand, the competent people are keenly alive to the interests of their professions, and if we could organize our politics, as the Russians have sought to organize theirs, on the basis of occupations, that is, in soviets, it might be possible to awaken in our intelligenzia a more than dilettante and sporting interest in local politics and the problems of the local community. But the actual situation is different. Our political system is founded on the presumption that the local community is the local political unit. If the local community is organized, knows its own local interests, and has a mind of its own, democracy prospers. It is said that 50 per cent of the qualified voters in this country do not exercise the franchise. So far as this is an index of their indifference to local community interests, it is at the same time a measure of the efficiency or inefficiency of the local community. The National Community Center Association represents one of many efforts in recent years to alter the situation of which non-voting is perhaps one evidence. Community organizations aim, for one thing, to discover, to organize, and to make available for the local community the local community’s resources, particularly its human resources. The extent to which it succeeds is the measure of its efficiency. How to assess these resources, how to use them: these are problems. II. THE COMMUNITY DEFINED But what is a community and what is community organization? Before assessing the communal efficiency one should at least be able to describe a community. The simplest possible description of a community is this: a collection of people occupying a more or less clearly defined area. But a community is more than that. A community is not only a collection of people, but it is a collection of institutions. Not people, but institutions, are final and decisive in distinguishing the community from other social constellations.