INTRODUCTION
and welfare of the people and of the country public opinion must be intelligent and enlightened and popular sentiment must be free from the corruption of self-seeking and narrow partisanship and sectarianism. The need for developing and uniting the full strength of the Nation for success in the great war in which we are engaged, not for self-aggrandizement but for the freedom of the world, has given a sudden impulse toward national organization and has shown that this can never be made effective except through community organization. We see now more clearly than ever before that the strength of a nation like ours depends on the developed strength of all of its constituent units and that a democracy must be alive in all its parts. For the welfare and safety of the democratic republic every final local community unit of it must be intelligent, virtuous and united for the public good. In these local communities the people must come together on terms of democratic equality for mutual instruction in regard to all things of common interest to them as members of these local communities and as members of the larger communities, of municipality, county, State and Nation. Here also they must learn to coöperate in production, exchanges and consumption for the protection of life, the promotion of health, the education of themselves and their children, and for all those things which can be had only in common and obtained only by united effort.
In response to an increasing consciousness of the
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