Although few obstacles had been thrown in the way of the War Department in purchasing property, it was discovered after the armistice that, because of existing and obsolete laws, it was most difficult to sell any. Up to the declaration of war the law which controlled this function provided that war department lands useless for military purposes should be sold _by the Secretary of the Interior_. When this law was enacted (1884) most of the lands occupied by the Army had come from the public domain, and it was logical to turn them back to that source when the War Department was through with them. In May, 1917, Congress authorized the War Department itself to sell national guard target ranges. In July, 1918, Congress authorized the President to sell, _through the head of any Executive Department_, lands acquired after the declaration of war against Germany to be the sites of war factories. In July, 1919, Congress authorized the sale under identical conditions of lands acquired for storage purposes. These, however, were the only exceptions granted to the original rule. In fact, when the War Department went about the purchase of the fourteen cantonment sites for the possible purpose of selling these lands later and thus getting better prices for the buildings on them, it did so with the knowledge that it would take a special act of Congress to authorize such a sale. Congress, without warning, attached a rider to the appropriation bill which was approved on July 11, 1919, forbidding the expenditure of any more money at all in the purchase of real estate by the Army except at the national guard camps or at the cantonments in use before November 11, 1918, and also except where the purchase of sites of industrial plants was necessary to protect the Government’s interests. The Secretary of War ruled that the fourteen cantonments then being purchased were exempt from this inhibition, but the law abruptly put an end to projects of the Real Estate Service to buy some 300,000 acres at a cost of $8,000,000. At that time the Service was buying 115,000 acres of land at Columbus, Georgia, to serve as an infantry school of arms, 120,000 acres at Fayetteville, North Carolina, to be an artillery range, and several other large acreages for various military purposes. The project to acquire Camp Humphreys, the Engineers’ camp in Virginia near the city of Washington, about 4,000 acres, was allowed to go through. [Illustration: _Photo from Construction Division_ WEST INDIAN LABORERS EMBARKING FOR HOME] [Illustration: _Photo from Construction Division_ VIEW OF CAMP SHERMAN]