Now there were no limitations imposed as to where these tools should be procured. No one but a fool or an ignoramus would have insisted that, engaged as we were in a life-and-death struggle with a savage and ruthless enemy, we should only procure the weapons with which to subdue that enemy within our own borders. If there is a marauder in your grounds, your chief concern is to get a gun; you do not particularly care whether it is your own gun or one loaned you by a neighbor, so long as it will shoot and shoot straight. The problem of the Ordnance Department, then, was to procure arms for our armies, to procure them in sufficient quantities, and to procure them quickly—_not to procure them in America only_. To have set any such limitations on our effort, no matter how flattering it might have been to national pride, would have cost untold lives, it would have greatly prolonged the war, and it might well have produced a different and far less happy result. So, because our allies were both able and glad to supply us from their surplus store, and because it was the only way that we could obtain immediate delivery of certain things without which our armies could not fight, we purchased artillery abroad, as well as ammunition for that artillery; we also purchased airplanes, automatic rifles, clothing, food, surgical instruments, medicinal supplies; we sent our forestry battalions into the French forests for lumber—they produced 50,000,000 feet in the month of October, 1917, alone; we quarried their stone to build our roads; we drew on their reservoirs for water—all highly proper courses of action, adopted with the fullest approval of France and England, and, indeed, at their express suggestion, for the purpose of utilizing the available ship tonnage of the world to the best and quickest advantage in effecting the defeat of our common enemy. Critics have brought the charge that we purchased ordnance from our allies, intimating that it was a scandalous proceeding for which the Ordnance Department should hang its head in shame. Yet I do not recall that those critics ever completed the story by stating that we sold to our allies ordnance and raw materials for ordnance to a value _five times greater than our purchases from them_.