This meeting, itself, is the result of the creation of one of these coordinating agencies by Executive Order. And what is involved in this meeting? Suppose a private corporation was spending, apart from the interest it paid on its debts, about one-fourth of all its expenditures along one certain line of activity. That is what this Government is doing through the Boards represented here,—Army, Navy, Veterans’ Bureau, etc. Supposing that business had run along for a hundred years and somebody would come in and say to the head of the business, “How much money are you spending on this particular activity?” “Well, so much, one-fourth of all we spend.” “Have you ever had a meeting of the heads of the agencies for the expenditure?” “No.” “Well, how do you know you are not duplicating facilities? How do you know there is any coordination between the establishments you are building in the securing of supplies, in the hiring of men?” “We don’t know. We never have had, in this business organization, even a meeting to discuss the question of proper expenditure of money upon the standpoint of one corporation as distinguished from five separate departments of a corporation.” Now what a ridiculous situation that is and yet that is what has pertained from the beginning of Government. We have forty-one independent governmental departments and establishments and each of them has been going on its own way and the result has been chaos in business, absolute chaos. It is a remarkable thing that here for the first time in the history of the Government you have got together the elements to determine the proper administration of this most important matter of the care of the sick and the disabled among the veterans of the war. For the first time it is possible, by this juxtaposition, to properly consider policies to prevent duplication, to devise ways and means and it is a comment upon the terrible conditions under which the business of this Government has been transacted, and that is the first instance where you could get them all together to discuss a coordinated policy. That has been so with everything. The meeting never would have gotten together, you never could have gotten together physically in connection with this thing unless you had been ordered together by the use of the Executive power of the President of the United States. Now don’t get that out of your head,—that underneath this reorganization of government, which is not to be effected, but which has been effected in this routine business, there is the idea of force, and if the idea of force was not there we would not have gotten anywhere in connection with the securing of these results, which small as they are, represent an immense advance upon the old situation. I speak now from the standpoint of the accomplishment of these coordinating boards,—not as predicting something that is going to be done, but of the result of that which has been done