Any consideration of our accomplishment must include the fact that we were as unprepared in April, 1917, for any immense military effort as we had been in August, 1914. While the world witnessed the British making citizen armies out of raw material by slow and costly processes, our governmental policy, to the regret of many of our people, had not been to profit by the application of their experience in view of the emergency which seemed inevitable to many observers, but, as neutrals, to keep ourselves free from any imputation of militaristic aims. Once we were in the war, the policy of our Government was to put all our preparations in the hands of the regular army and to assist the Allies in every way that was in our power. Our people had learned from observation of the European war that modern warfare required expert direction, and with a unanimity that was startling in a democracy which had always resisted any efforts to form a large army in our country we welcomed the national draft and a centralization of authority in the hands of the President and army chiefs which was out of keeping with all our precedents. Our training camps were to repeat under the draft the slow and wearisome business of training not only men but officers to command them at the same time that we were building new factories and plants to supply the army with ordnance and with ships to transport men and material to France. As the Allies had waited on England to become prepared, they must now wait on the United States; and in the crisis of their fortunes, when the Germans had had repeated successes, they faced the question of whether or not the resources of the United States in men and material could be transformed into a force that could be exerted by sea against the submarine or on the western front in time to prevent a German victory.