Mr. Chester W. Cuthell was the Special Representative of the Secretary of War. His Board consisted of lawyers and accountants whom he chose and appointed. The duties of Mr. Cuthell and his Board were to terminate and settle up the war business of the Allies in the United States under those arrangements in which the War Department had been a participant, whether as agent, producer, or partner. The Board was therefore essentially the agency for liquidating the international business on this side of the Atlantic. The United States Liquidation Commission, on the other hand, was the agency created to liquidate America’s war industry abroad; and this was much the greater of the two tasks. The United States Liquidation Commission was charged, also, with an added duty: that of disposing of all American surplus military property on foreign soil. We must think of both these activities in international demobilization as going on simultaneously, as they did. The two agencies were created almost at the same time: Mr. Cuthell was appointed on January 22, 1919, and the United States Liquidation Commission was created on the following February 11. Also it was necessary that they both work in the closest contact and coöperation with each other, since the arrangements of both would have to come together in the final settlements, the American claims against the Allies, as substantiated by the Board, going to offset the Allied claims against us, as acknowledged by the Liquidation Commission. This liaison and harmony existed. The coöperation, too, extended to the adoption of certain broad policies which were to be followed by both in liquidating the business. One of these, and perhaps the most important one, was that, in the negotiations that were to follow, no nation should expect to profit at the expense of any of the others. The settlements should be made on the basis of actual cost. A second policy was that international agreements and understandings, even though they had never been committed formally to writing, were to have the binding force of formal contracts. In other words, the business would be settled as among partners and friends, no one of whom wished to take advantage of the others.