This was all wealth, the true substance of the nation, its resources fabricated by its labor for the special purposes of war; and, with the war over, with little or no demand or use for these special materials, they could be disposed of only at a shocking sacrifice. Again, we cannot estimate the extent of the shrinkage, but we can indicate it. Up to March 1, 1920, the War Department had disposed of surplus property which had cost it $2,600,000,000. For this it had received $1,633,000,000. The recovery, therefore, was 64 per cent of the cost; the loss, 36 per cent. The shrinkage in values is one of the wastes which any nation must contemplate and accept when it sets forth to wage war on the modern scale. The nation can get value received for the cost of its munitions only by using them in war. The largest of American companies, the United States Steel Corporation, in 1918, its busiest year, did a gross business of $1,745,000,000. The value of the surplus munitions produced before the armistice was nearly twice as great as that. The Steel Corporation, however, produced only a few dozen or few score sorts of products. The sorts of goods and materials to be disposed of by the Sales Branch were in number about 250,000, and this range embraced goods known in many branches of trade. The Steel Corporation and other great companies usually sell to a relatively small group of customers, who take the products in wholesale quantities. The market which the Sales Branch entered consisted of the entire United States, with 110,000,000 possible buyers; for part of the problem was to dispose of surplus materials by retail sale to the public. All in all, this may be regarded as the greatest merchandizing enterprise ever undertaken in America. The 250,000 catalogue items in the sales list were divided roughly into seven commodity groups, as follows: (1) railway and building materials and contractors’ equipment; (2) manufacturing plants and plant sites; (3) machine tools; (4) vehicles and airplanes, including spare engines and parts; (5) quartermaster stores; (6) ordnance and technical equipment, including office equipment; and (7) raw materials, scrap metal, and waste materials. It was recognized at the outset that to throw on the market vast quantities of supplies and materials in all these seven categories was to court disaster to the industrial situation. Business and industry immediately after the armistice were in a ticklish position. They faced the complete transition from the war to the peace basis, an uncharted region through which it seemed likely that they could go safely only under the wisest of guidance. If, in addition to its inevitable troubles of reconstruction, industry were to have to face cutthroat competition with the surpluses of the very goods its own mills had created during the war, it was evident that the difficulties of the transition might be doubled.