The loan proved to be popular in a degree of which the world afforded no equal. Never had there been a loan taken by 9,400,000 subscribers. It surpassed all previous experience of Government loans. The single offering was larger than the total takings in all subscriptions made in the four years of the Civil War. It far exceeded the response to any government loan of the other belligerents. With an ample treasury to draw from, provided by Congress and the public, the Government proceeded with the war preparations, but in face of inevitable obstacles and friction. The American military establishment was not designed for making War on a huge scale, and, like the British War Office at the beginning of hostilities, was swamped and confused by an avalanche of new responsibilities. There were admitted shortages in clothing, artillery, and machine guns in the cantonments, and delays in the construction of new shipping also produced impatient criticism. Congress interposed by investigations into the general conduct of the war, with the result that the air was cleared and defects of organization located. The investigations appeared to have developed primarily not so much from ineffective and wrong decisions in meeting war needs as from delays due to indecision and procrastination. The result was a change of administrative methods aiming at a centralization of authority, which England and France had early found imperative in conducting the war, instead of depending on a bureaucratic system with its complicated channels of distributed authority. The friction which had arisen seemed to be substantially due to a clash between the methods of business men, whom the administration had requisitioned into war service, and the red tape of an established governmental system. The Administration recognized at length that an infusion into the Government ranks of capable business organizers, bent on conducting their share of the war with expedition, could not blend with departmental systems clogged by traditions, customs, rules, and regulations, written and unwritten. The whole Government became engaged in a process of introspection. The investigations compelled it to see itself as others saw it, and were salutary in that respect alone. In other directions the inquiries revealed, in spite of departmental shortcomings, that an enormous amount of work had been accomplished in a short time. When war was declared the country was wholly unprepared; it was working at full capacity in many war fields to maintain the largest foreign commerce reached in its history. Its industries being thus occupied on the outbreak of war, they could not readily digest a flood of orders, aggregating more than ten billion dollars in value, which the Government suddenly superimposed upon their capacities, with their equipments already driving at top speed under forced draft. On one point at least there was agreement--that the task so far accomplished could not have