No outline of the demobilization of the quartermaster war enterprises portrays an adequate picture of what happened unless it tells something about the termination of the Government’s wool business. To protect its war interests the Government requisitioned all the raw wool in the United States in 1917 and 1918. Uncle Sam himself became the wool trade, the sole dealer, the sole market. Although the Navy and several other government branches used wool, the control over the commodity was exercised by the War Department through its Wool Administrator at Boston, who reported to the Quartermaster General in Washington. On the first day of the armistice the Government had on its hands, or was obligated to accept delivery of, about 525,000,000 pounds of wool, a quantity which may be visualized by comparing it with the total annual American production of wool, which is less than 300,000,000 pounds. About one-fifth of this quantity was Australasian wool which had been purchased by the Foreign Mission of the War Industries Board. About 100,000 bales (33,000,000 pounds) of the Australasian wool had been shipped to the United States. We were left, therefore, with a binding contract to accept 200,000 bales from the Antipodes, this to come piling in on top of an accumulation which comprised a huge surplus over and above the normal national consumption. By some clever business jockeying (the British having various American contracts which they also wished to terminate) the British Government was induced to cancel the unfulfilled portion of the wool contract. Even with this deduction, the Wool Administrator had, in the late autumn of 1918, about 460,000,000 pounds of wool to dispose of. The normal textile industry had never before been called upon to absorb such a visible supply, and there was some question if it would be able to do so. The manufacturers naturally began at once to urge the Government to dump its wool on the market. The 700,000 American wool growers, on the other hand, who had been receiving a high and stable price for wool (the price adopted on July 30, 1917) urged the Government to stay in the business for another year at least and take the 1919 clip at the war price. The decision in Washington was to sell the wool and get out of the wool business at once. This was displeasing to the farmers; but, to prevent any drastic slump in wool prices, the War Department decided to sell its wool in auction sales, in which the Government itself would set minimum prices below which no wool would be sold. This action guaranteed that the growers would get a fair price for the 1919 clip.