Consider again this "vital area"--the great metropolitan districts of Boston, of New York, of Philadelphia, of Baltimore--almost a continuous city, in fact, all the way along the Atlantic coast from the south tip of Maine to the Potomac. It stretches west to the Alleghenies, in fact we may say a little beyond them, to include such vigorous communities as Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Buffalo. Here in this "vital area" of the nation are more than eighty per cent of its munition-making plants, its largest hard coal and soft coal deposits, its steel-making plants, its greatest shipyards and its three most important navy yards. Major General Leonard Wood has said that 1,500,000 men would be necessary to properly defend the coast-line from Portland, Maine, to Washington. Therefore the railroad main stem that connects these cities and the many larger cities between them is the most important military base line upon this continent. It needs all the resources of two- and four- and even six-tracked railroads, for General Wood has gone on record as saying that in a national crisis it might be necessary to move half a million men on this great base line within the course of ten short hours. On a conservative estimate these would require 500 trains--trains which, stood end to end, would reach all the way from New York to Washington or to Utica. Such a train movement would stagger even the imagination of a passenger-traffic manager accustomed to figure the "business" in and out of a national inauguration or a big football game at Princeton or New Haven or Cambridge. A railroader whose pencil has a quick aptitude for figures has estimated that Germany has seven and a half locomotives for every ten miles of track. We have one-third that proportion. Yet the preponderance of what our railroad men like to call "motive power" lies east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio. The same thing is true of cars--cars of every sort and variety. That is not the problem. Here it is. Suppose, if you will, that an enemy finding an entrance to America on the sandy south shore of Long Island--to choose the spot most in the favor of the writers of the lurid fiction of an imaginary war between some European nation and the United States--has actually succeeded in capturing the city of New York. The great military base line of America is broken at its most important point. How are Major General Wood and the rest of the men who are puzzling the great problem out with him, going to move a half-million men--a half or a quarter of that number from New England over into Pennsylvania or down toward the defense lines around the national capital?