The policy of discharging troops at centers adjacent to their homes rested upon a sound foundation. As the country faced the demobilization of 4,000,000 troops, young men most of whom had been held for many months under the rigid restraints of army discipline, there was a widespread apprehension that the discharged soldiers might congregate in the larger cities and create profound economic disturbances. Upon the War Department there was no compulsion of law to transport the troops to their own neighborhoods before discharging them. Obviously the easy and convenient thing was to discharge them wherever they happened to be--at the thousand and one camps in the United States, or at the Atlantic ports upon their arrival from France--discharge them there, pay them off, and so farewell to them. Such, in fact, had been army procedure before the World War. The Army discharged its men at the posts where they were serving and paid to them the travel allowances granted by law. Whether they used their money to pay for actual transportation home was no concern of the Army’s. They were all free, and most of them white and twenty-one. As long as discharges were relatively few this procedure had no effect upon the economic life of the nation. But what would have been the result if the War Department had continued this practice when disbanding the 4,000,000 troops in uniform on the day of the armistice? Most of them would have been turned loose in the vicinity of the large cities of the United States--more than 1,000,000 of them at New York alone. Their pockets would have been crammed with money. Congress by special enactment raised the travel allowance for discharged soldiers to five cents a mile, payable for the distance between the place of discharge and the soldier’s home, whether the entire journey could be accomplished by railroad or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every soldier--payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every man received a considerable sum of money with his discharge certificate, and for the overseas soldier this sum probably averaged more than $100. The streets of our cities would have been thronged with such men during the first six months of 1919. After their hardships the temptation to have a fling at metropolitan entertainments would have been well-nigh irresistible. They would have been fair game for gamblers and sharp practitioners. The rare individual might have bought his ticket and gone soberly home, but the majority could scarcely have been expected to show such restraint. In a little while, pockets that had jingled with money would have been empty, the streets would have been crowded with stranded soldiers, and the burdened municipalities would have had to face a severe civic problem.