Almost the first thing Mr. Schwab did was to move his headquarters to Philadelphia as the centre of the steel-shipbuilding region, taking with him all the division chiefs of the Fleet Corporation directly connected with construction work and about 2,000 employes. The Shipping Board and Mr. Piez retained their offices in Washington with 1,500 subordinates and employes. As a further step toward decentralization it was arranged to move the operating department, including agencies such as the Interallied Ship Control Committee, headed by P. A. S. Franklin, to New York City. The original "cost-plus" contract under which the Submarine Boat Corporation of Newark was to build 160 ships of 5,000 tons for the Government was canceled by Mr. Schwab as an experiment to determine whether shipyards operating under lump-sum contracts and accepting all responsibility for providing materials could make greater speed in construction than those operating with Government money, such as the Hog Island yards. The result was to increase the cost of each of the 160 ships from $787,500 to $960,000. A request for an appropriation of $2,223,835,000 for the 1919 program was presented by Mr. Hurley and Mr. Schwab to the House Appropriations Committee on May 8. Of this total $1,386,100,000 was for construction of ships and $652,000,000 for the purchasing and requisitioning of plants and material in connection with the building program. Third Liberty Loan Oversubscribed Approximately 17,000,000 Buyers When the Third Liberty Loan, raised to finance America's war needs, closed on May 4, 1918, the subscriptions were well over $4,000,000,000, a billion in excess of the amount called for. The total was announced on May 17 as $4,170,019,650. Secretary McAdoo stated that he would allot bonds in full on all subscriptions. The loan was regarded as the most successful ever floated by any nation, not so much because of the volume of sales, but because of the wide distribution of the loan. Approximately 17,000,000 individuals subscribed, that is, about one person in every six in the United States. The number of buyers in the Third Loan exceeded those in the Second by 7,000,000 and those in the First by 12,500,000. The campaign throughout the country was conducted with all the thoroughness of a great political struggle, with the difference that there were no contending parties and all forces were marshaled to make the loan a success. Nor was the campaign merely a display of efficient organization and vigorous propaganda. It had many features of dramatic and picturesque interest, not only in the large cities, but in almost every smaller centre of the nation. A noonday rally of 50,000 men and women in Wall Street, New York, on the closing day, was typical. An eyewitness described it thus: