only a little rusting would destroy the fit of the contact surfaces and ruin the unassembled jackets and hoops, and therefore the company was instructed to assemble these otherwise perishable elements before stopping the work. After the shrinking, all uncompleted pieces were slushed in grease, packed for protection, and stored away, to be used, according to the plan, in the manufacture which will be necessary in the peace-time maintenance of the artillery equipment. Some of the incomplete Bullard tubes of the 155’s were later transferred to the Watervliet Arsenal and finished with the machinery there. The arsenal completed 300 guns of this size after the armistice. This, essentially, so far as the partially finished units were concerned, was the procedure followed by the Ordnance Department in all nineteen emergency gun plants. Although the mills turning out rough forgings for the gun plants were taken from this branch of war work immediately after the armistice, the Ordnance Department reserved and stored a supply of forgings in order to keep the future gun plants in operation until new forging mills can come into production. Seventeen of the emergency gun plants were closed out altogether after the armistice. Two remain among the war assets of the United States, held “in ordinary,” as the phrase goes, meaning that they are closed, but ready with machinery and materials in all stages of completion to start up in full operation as soon as the workmen can be recruited and the fires started. These two additions to our arsenal system were named the Rochester Gun Plant and the Erie Howitzer Plant; and at these two plants and at the government arsenals the Ordnance Department concentrated the great equipment of machinery, tools, plans, and materials left on its hands after the dissolution of the gunmaking industry created by the war, all stored so systematically that the War Department, at any time for years to come, can, in theory, at any rate, quickly reëstablish a gun industry on the scale known in 1918. Recently it has been proposed to transfer the facilities at Rochester to some other place. The existence of this manufacturing equipment in the possession of the Ordnance Department gives the United States a stronger military potentiality than the nation ever possessed before. For the first time in our history the Government itself during peace is in possession of extensive facilities for the manufacture of light and medium-heavy artillery. Before the war the Army procured all its field guns (and those only in negligible quantities) principally from private makers. Its two gunmaking arsenals, Watertown and Watervliet, turned out principally large guns for fixed mounting at the coastal forts. Before showing what was done at the Rochester and Erie plants, it is worth while pausing to note the legacy received from the war industry of 1917–1918 by the two established gunmaking arsenals.