First of all, I would wish to convey to you some conception of the vastness of the organization commonly referred to as Army Ordnance, the immensity of the sums which it expended, and the enormous quantities in which it dealt. It has been said that a billion is too huge a figure for any one to comprehend. Scarcely a billion minutes have elapsed since the birth of Christ. Yet the estimated cost of the ordnance required to supply our first 5,000,000 men was nearly _thirteen billions of dollars_. But that is, after all, merely an endless caravan of ciphers. Here is another way of expressing it. Between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the declaration of war against Germany, the sixty-four successive congresses of the United States appropriated but twenty-six billion dollars for every purpose of government, including the cost of five wars, the pensions resulting from those wars, the upkeep of the Army and Navy, the activities of the State, Interior, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Post-Office Departments, the control of immigration, the administration of justice, river and harbor improvements, public buildings and public works of every description, the salary of every government employee from the President of the United States to the keeper of an obscure lighthouse in the Philippines, these countless items representing in the aggregate the total expenditures, over a period of more than seven-score years, of the richest nation in the world. Thus it will be seen that, had the war continued for another five months, a single branch of the army would have expended approximately one-half as much as the nation expended from its foundation to the date on which it entered the great conflict. Combine the wealth of all of America’s millionaires, add the value of all of America’s railways, throw in the Standard Oil, the Western Union, the Ford Motor Company, and the United States Steel Corporation for good measure, and you will still fall far short of the staggering total which the United States had planned to invest in ordnance. Or, if these comparisons are not sufficiently graphic, the Ordnance Department would have spent enough in the first two years of war to have built twenty-four Panama Canals, to have purchased the entire city of New York, at its assessed valuation, twice over, or to have built 36,000,000 Ford cars—one for every third person in the United States. That is the best that I can do to give you a realization of the immensity of the task assigned to the Ordnance Department.