Through the Bureau of War Risk Insurance of the Department of the Treasury the nation made generous provision for its fighting forces and their dependents. No other government had ever provided for them so liberally, nor had any other, not even excepting our own in previous wars, gone about the business in so just and so scientific a manner. Established at the beginning of the world war to insure the hulls and cargoes of American vessels against the risks of war, the scope of the Bureau was enlarged after our entrance into the conflict to include the personnel of the merchant marine and the officers, enlisted men and nurses of the Army and the Navy. It had also in its charge the compensation awards for death or disability to be paid to the men of these services or their dependents and the payment of allotments to their families. So enormous was the work of the Bureau that it soon became one of the greatest of business enterprises and beyond question the largest life insurance concern in the world. It had written, at the end of hostilities, 4,000,000 policies totaling over $37,000,000,000 and equaling in amount the total life insurance in force at that time in all American companies, ordinary, industrial and fraternal, both at home and abroad. The maximum policy that could be taken out was for $10,000 and the average taken was for about $8,750. Premiums to the end of the year amounted to $630,000,000. At the signing of the armistice the Bureau was issuing checks for compensation awards, allotments and insurance averaging a million per month in number and calling for the payment of a million dollars a day. It then had on file 30,000,000 individual insurance records of various kinds and, in addition, there were afterwards brought from France twenty-six tons of such records of insurance issued after the men had gone overseas. The enormous amount of work done by this Bureau was only one factor in the wartime expansion of the duties of the Treasury Department that brought about grave problems of administration. Thousands of new employees were needed for the vastly increased work of the Internal Revenue Bureau, with its new phases due to the inauguration of direct personal taxation, and thousands more for the work of the War Risk Insurance Bureau, the new tasks of each Bureau calling for special skill. The Insurance Bureau had 13,000 employees, recruited and trained in a year. Other expansions made necessary still more thousands of workers. Office space for them and for the records that must be kept had to be provided, the employees had to be found and the greater part of them had to be trained for their special tasks. The problem of training was met by establishing schools within the Treasury Department in which intensive work prepared applicants for their duties in a short time. CHAPTER XXII THE BRIDGE OF BOATS