Providing for an enlisted strength of 74,700 regulars, Congress also authorized the President to increase the Navy to 87,000 in case of emergency. This, with the 6,000 apprentice seamen, the Hospital Corps, and allowance for the sick, prisoners and men on probation, would give us an emergency strength of some 95,000--including both officers and men, a force of over 100,000. Five thousand additional enlisted men and 255 more officers were authorized for the Marine Corps, which could be raised in emergency to 17,500. The increases alone were larger than the entire number of men employed by the Navy in the Spanish War. The Naval Reserve, instituted in 1915, was made a Naval Reserve Force unlimited in numbers. The Naval Militia had grown to a force of nearly 10,000, and interest had been stimulated by a training cruise for civilians on eleven war vessels, known as the "Ocean Plattsburg." The Act of 1916 laid the basis for the enormous personnel we secured during the war--over half a million men in the Navy, and 75,000 in the Marine Corps. Immediately after its passage, a vigorous recruiting campaign was begun. Large reserves of powder and shells had been accumulated, but orders were given for much more, and efforts were made to speed up projectiles under manufacture. "We had at the end of 1916," Admiral Strauss, then Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, stated, "batteries of four guns each for 189 auxiliary ships. These batteries were housed at navy yards, and the full supply of powder, shell, primers, etc., were all prepared and ready for these ships at the nearest ammunition depots, so that in the event of war the guns could be secured on the ships and the magazines and shell-rooms supplied at once." Equipment for ships to be converted, and spare parts of all kinds were accumulated and stored at points where they would be quickly available. All the bureaus concerned with construction, shipbuilding, conversion, and repair, engines and machinery, ordnance and supplies were increasing production, reporting, as did our vessels, constant improvement in "readiness for war." This was the result of two years' constant work. Special duties were imposed from the beginning of the European conflict in 1914. Only a few days after hostilities began, the cruisers _Tennessee_ and _North Carolina_ sailed, carrying millions of dollars in gold to relieve the thousands of Americans stranded in Europe, unable to get home. Naval vessels were kept busy along our coasts, enforcing neutrality in our territorial waters. Naval censors were placed at wireless stations, preventing the sending of unneutral messages. Intelligence officers were active in thwarting the machinations of German spies and plotters. But all this was small in comparison with the efforts we were making to increase and improve the Navy in its every branch and prepare it for any emergency.