Soldiers of the surname of Smith received 15,200 of these bonus checks, and these were only the Smiths among the 1,600,000 troops discharged before March 1, 1919. If the same percentage carried through the rest of the Army, it is evident that there were enough Smiths in uniform to make up an entire combat division with a sufficient residue over to provide the necessary accompaniment of supply troops. If pushed to it, the Smith family could fight a respectable war on its own account. But the balance of power is maintained by the Brown army. The Brown family collected 9,000 of the 1,600,000 bonus checks issued from Washington in the spring of 1919. Although every effort was made to pay off all troops in full at the time of their discharge, there were many men who, through their own fault or the fault of those in command of them, or else because of conditions over which there was no control, failed to receive all of the money rightfully theirs when they left the military service. For such men the remedy was the claim. A financial claim against the Government is notoriously a static thing. At the present day there are Civil War claims still outstanding and unsettled. The Director of Finance determined that the World War should leave behind it no great body of soldier claimants to haunt Washington and nurse their grievances for years to come. Under the ordinary procedure the claims of soldiers for arrears of pay had to go through the channels of both the War Department and the Treasury Department before final payments could be made. The Director of Finance sought and, on January 30, 1919, received a decision of the Comptroller of the Treasury which permitted the former to settle back-pay claims without reference to the Treasury Department when there was no construction of law involved and the rights of the claimants were evident. Although the claimants numbered many thousands, the number was relatively small compared to the total number of men in uniform. At the end of the calendar year 1919, less than 5 per cent of the nearly 4,000,000 men who were under arms on the first day of the armistice had filed claims with the War Department. Three-fourths of the claims were for the refund of allotments deducted from pay but for one reason or another never paid by the Government to the allottees; so that only a little more than 1 per cent of the Army left the service with claims resulting from errors in soldiers’ pay accounts. Because of the more intricate financial relations between officers and the War Department, the claims of officers were greater in proportion, but the officers’ claims submitted up to the end of the year 1919 amounted in number to only 10 per cent of the total number of officers commissioned.