On the industrial side demobilization was the liquidation of a business whose commitments had reached the staggering total of $35,000,000,000. Demobilization meant taking practically the entire industrial structure of the United States, which had become one vast munitions plant, and converting it again into an instrumentality for producing the commodities of peaceful commerce. This without stopping an essential wheel, and also in the briefest possible time, for the world was in sore need of these products. Efficient demobilization, it follows, would permit the 7,000,000 industrial war workers to turn without a break in employment from the production of war supplies to that of peace supplies. At the base of modern business stability lies the inviolability of contracts. He who breaches a contract must expect to pay indemnity, and the Government cannot except itself from this rule. Demobilization meant the suspension and termination of war contracts running into billions in value, many of them without a scrap of paper to show as a written instrument; it meant termination without laying the Government open to the payment of damages, and therefore it implied the honorable adjustment of the claims of the contractors. One of the conditions on which complete demobilization depended was the adoption of a future military policy for the United States. But this was in the hands, not of the military organization, but of Congress. The whole program, therefore, could not be put through until Congress had acted. After the policy was defined, then it became the duty of the demobilization forces to choose and store safely the reserve equipment for the permanent establishment and for the field use of a possible future combatant force until another war industry could be brought into existence. When that had been done there would remain a surplus of military property. It thereupon became the function of demobilization to dispose of this property through a sales organization that would have in its stocks goods of a greater variety and value than those at the disposal of any private sales agency in the United States. This branch of the work also included the sale of great quantities of A. E. F. supplies in Europe, which was already glutted with the surpluses of its own armies. The sales at home must include the sale of hundreds of buildings put up for the war establishment. Paradoxically, demobilization included the acquirement of large quantities of real estate--for the storage of reserve supplies and the creation of a physical plant for the permanent military establishment. Finally, demobilization meant the delicate business of striking a cash balance that would terminate our relations with the Allies, meeting their claims against us for the supply of materials and for the use and destruction of private property abroad, and pressing our own claims against them for materials sold to them.