It purchased every stock of rubber boots and rain-coats in the United States. It established and operated farms and truck-gardens at the various camps and cantonments. By organizing a Salvage Service for the reclamation of articles which would otherwise have been thrown away it saved 151,000,000 of the taxpayers’ dollars. The army needed horses and mules—thousands and thousands of them—whereupon the Quartermaster Corps gave commissions to half a hundred of America’s best-known sportsmen and gentlemen riders and sent them to the West, to Spain, to the Argentine, to purchase animals. General Pershing cabled that he wanted sheet-music for the 390 bands of the A. E. F., whereupon the Quartermaster Corps, not being itself musically inclined, looked about for a man who was. It was discovered that the most successful composer of popular music in America had enlisted in the Coast Guard, but the Quartermaster Corps borrowed him, told him to select the sort of music that he thought the boys in France would like, and send it to Pershing. He did. It cheered up the army overseas and cost the government $50,000. It was cheap at the price. The Quartermaster Corps educated manufacturers in the production of articles strange to their experience, and in some cases it developed entirely new industries. It was a shipmaster, a wool-grower, a coal-operator, a clothier, a builder of vehicles, a school-teacher, a reformer of labor conditions, an inventor of new products, and an originator of new methods. To the miners of Pennsylvania, quarrying coal in the low-roofed galleries by the light of their flickering lamps, to the fruit-pickers in the sun-drenched orchards of Hood River and the Santa Clara, to the pallid clothing-workers, bending over their machines in the stifling sweat-shops of the New York Ghetto, to the great manufacturers of New England, and to the beef barons of the Middle West, “Quartermaster Corps, United States Army,” was a phrase to conjure with. * * * * *