As an organizing machinery and provider of means by which the whole nation could be brought into coöperation for war effort swiftly and efficiently, the Council of National Defense did not confine itself to the material phases of the country’s resources but also helped the national spirit to find adequate expression. To that end it organized a great, nation-wide system by which the war machinery was synchronized to harmonious work through every smallest section of the country and through which the national spirit was enabled to find expression in effective action. Under the State Councils Section of the National Council of Defense within a few months there had been organized in every state of the Union a State Council of Defense whose function was to centralize and coördinate the war work within the state, to coöperate with the work of the National Council, to inaugurate whatever new work local conditions rendered advisable and to create and direct local councils. County councils were organized in every county of each state and within most of the counties community councils, usually with the school district serving as the unit, were formed. These community councils were not committees, but were the community itself, with all its citizens and agencies organized for coöperative, effective, national service. It was a neighborhood democracy made effective by organization and it established a direct means of reciprocal communication between the Government and the masses of the people. An immense and closely woven network thus overspread the country consisting, under the State Councils, of 4,000 county organizations, 16,000 women’s divisions and 164,000 community and municipal units, extending through the wards of cities, through towns and villages, across farming countrysides. The Woman’s Committee of the Council, described at more length in the chapter on “The Work of Women for the War,” collaborated constantly, organizing the women of every community for any sort of war work they could do. While the functioning of the Councils, State, County and Community, was kept flexible and responsive to local initiative and local conditions, their most important work was that of translating into action those war policies of the Government that called for the coöperation of the people. Through them were made effective such nation-wide movements as the conservation of food and coal, the increasing of food production, the mobilization of industry, the selling of bonds and war stamps, the marshalling of labor, while there was hardly a war effort of the Government of any sort in which they did not give aid. So remarkable and important has been this unifying of the nation by means of the system brought into life for war purposes by the Council of National Defense that it is likely to remain as a permanent and useful feature of the life of the country in the coming years of peace.