There was no questioning the superiority of the Springfield in point of accuracy. Time after time we pitted our Army shooting teams against those of the other nations of the earth and won the international competitions with the Springfield. We won the Olympic shoot of 1908 over England, Canada, France, Sweden, Norway, Greece, and Denmark. Again, in 1912, we won the Olympic shoot against England, Sweden, South Africa, France, Norway, Greece, Denmark, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. In 1912 the Springfield rifle, in the hands of Yankee marksmen, won the Pan American match at Buenos Aires, and in 1913 it defeated Argentina, Canada, Sweden, and Peru. In all of these matches the Mauser rifle was fired by various teams; but the Springfield never failed to defeat this German weapon, which it was to meet later in the fighting of the great war. Altogether the Springfield rifle defeated the military rifles of 15 nations in shooting competitions prior to the war, and in 1912, at Ottawa, an American team firing Springfields set marksmanship records for 800 yards, 900 yards, and 1,000 yards that have never been broken. Much is to be said for the men behind these guns, but due credit must be given to the rifles that put the bullets where the marksmen aimed. Such was the history of this splendid arm when the United States neared the brink of the great conflict. But as war became inevitable for us and we began to have a realization of the scale on which we must prosecute it, our ordnance officers studying the rifle problem became persuaded that our Army could not hope to carry this magnificent weapon to Europe as its chief small-arms reliance. A brief examination of the industrial problem presented by the rifle situation in 1917 should make it clear even to a man unacquainted with machinery and manufacturing why it would be humanly impossible to equip our troops with the rifle in developing which our ordnance experts had spent so many years. The Model 1903 rifle had been built in two factories and only two--the Springfield Armory, Springfield, Mass., and the Rock Island Arsenal at Rock Island, Ill. Our Government for several years prior to 1917 had cut down its expenditures for the manufacture of small arms and ammunition. The result was that the Rock Island Arsenal had ceased its production of Springfields altogether, while the output of rifles from the Springfield Armory had been greatly reduced.