TO ensure a truly national campaign, NWAC activities could only be organised at a local level. By September 1917, it was judged that all constituencies required local War Aims Committees, rather than the 200 or so initially targeted. Having decided that the public was war-weary and in need of patriotic revival, Lloyd George had demanded a domestic propaganda organisation. Once the NWAC had been established to fulfil this role, its organisers canvassed local opinion, seeking to discover where work was required and where local political authorities judged that the public remained sound. José Harris claims that, politically and culturally, Britain experienced ‘a subterranean shift in the balance of social life away from the locality to the metropolis and the nation’ after 1900, but local institutions and expertise remained crucial to the successful organisation of any nationwide campaign. Historians have recently asserted the ‘enduring power of the local’ in both political and cultural terms, corroborating Duncan Tanner's contention that, at least until 1918, the ‘context of social experience … was local, not national’ and that politics consequently had to be tailored to non-uniform local expectations. These assertions are supported by the NWAC's organisational structure, and the content of its propaganda (on which, see chapter 7). The central committee could have only very limited knowledge of public opinion in individual localities. By contrast, party agents, who usually acted as secretaries and chief organisers of WACs, brought specialist knowledge of their constituency, not only of local political attitudes, but also of the area's human geography and the patterns of everyday lives. In relation to foreign propaganda, Masterman had affirmed in 1915 the importance of avoiding the German example of ‘promiscuous dumping of unwanted literature’, which served only to irritate ‘those who she wishes to win over’. The same possibility applied locally for domestic propaganda – what might be appropriate for one area was not necessarily appropriate for all. By combining central resources with local organisation and expertise the NWAC could offer a more flexible and locally responsive campaign than with a purely central approach. Further, the involvement with, and tacit endorsement of, the NWAC by local figures constituted a significant ideological imperative, offering some appearance of spontaneity and self-mobilisation rather than overarching state-driven propaganda.