The report for 1913 declares that such increase of personnel as had been allowed had “not been sufficient to accomplish anything in the way of bringing up the arrearages which have been steadily accumulating ever since the service was organized in 1907.” These arrearages were described as consisting of “unindexed and unexamined certificates of naturalization and declarations of intention,” and this condition prevailed, notwithstanding an average daily overtime estimate in hours, as equivalent to full time, of more than two persons (2.36). The report for 1914 acknowledged an increase of nine clerks, but stated that “the arrearages of work continued to increase.” So it goes on, the following report (1915) disclosing an arrearage of 346,762 declarations of intention and 395,719 certificates of naturalization unindexed, and thousands more of each unexamined. In the following year’s report is acknowledged the “elimination of the practice heretofore pursued of indexing separately the declarations, petitions, and certificates,” it having been found impossible, even with four more clerks, “to reduce the work that has fallen into arrears.” Yet in that same year’s report begin the ecstatic descriptions of a very wide expansion of activities in the field of education. The seriousness of this curtailment of records at Washington--all but fatal to the individual alien who wants to prove something about his naturalization case by reference to such records--took on a public aspect with the operation of the Selective Service Act (the so-called “draft law”) when aliens, desiring exemption as such, began to assert to the local exemption boards that they never had declared intention to become American citizens. “The assistance of the Bureau is constantly invoked by the draft boards throughout the country for official report on the claims to exemption from military service by aliens who profess to have made no declaration of intention to become citizens,” says the opening page of the Commissioner’s report of July 1, 1918, notwithstanding the more ingenuous--not to say more truthful--confession of a year before that “_The unavoidable abandonment of indexing declarations has made it impracticable to furnish information sought in regard to aliens claiming exemption from military service._”[94] At the date of that report, there were, unexamined, in the Washington office 247,373 declarations and 480,553 certificates; one year later--owing, perhaps, largely to the vast and sudden addition of alien soldiers naturalized, and the business incidental thereto, if not quite as much to the absorption of the Bureau in its increasingly ambitious educational campaign--the arrearages had passed the half-million mark, with 628,713 declarations and 578,944 certificates of naturalization unexamined.