The Secretary of War appointed Mr. Edwin B. Parker chairman of the United States Liquidation Commission. As members he appointed Brigadier General Charles G. Dawes, Mr. Homer H. Johnson, and Hon. Henry F. Hollis. During the active part of the war Judge Parker had held the important post of priorities commissioner of the War Industries Board. General Dawes, in private life a Chicago banker, had been General Purchasing Agent of the A. E. F. In 1920 he sprang into national prominence when, as a witness before a congressional investigating committee, in vigorous and unconventional style he defended the material transactions of the A. E. F. and denounced those critics who, in searching for waste and lavish expenditure, evidently overlooked the fact that the prime purpose of the A. E. F. was to defeat a dangerous enemy on the field of battle. His striking utterances on that occasion did more than reams of printed propaganda to reconcile the American public to the inevitable wastes of the war. President Harding soon afterwards appointed “Hell and Maria” Dawes, as he had come to be known, federal budget commissioner, thus placing him in charge of the most important attempt at economy in national expenditures which the United States had ever made. Mr. Johnson was an able and well-known lawyer of Cleveland. Mr. Hollis was a former United States senator from New Hampshire. When the Liquidation Commission reached France and organized for work about March 1, 1919, it found the ground well prepared for it. Mr. Edward R. Stettinius, the well-known New York financier, had been sent to France in July, 1918, as a special representative of the Secretary of War to act as a sort of surveyor-general over the war industry resulting from the foreign orders placed by the American Expeditionary Forces. Mr. Stettinius found that a considerable part of the munitions being procured abroad was being produced and delivered under informal and more or less vague agreements and understandings. Before the armistice Mr. Stettinius had done his best to reduce some of the more important of these understandings to the form of written, definite contracts. Promptly after the armistice he took steps to cancel all further production for the Americans and then began the negotiations leading to the settlements. Mr. Stettinius resigned in January, 1919, and the United States Liquidation Commission inherited these various negotiations in the stages at which Mr. Stettinius left them.