It was no small part of this huge shipping program to provide officers and crews for the ships that were sliding from their ways with increasing rapidity. For, along with the decrease in ship-building, Americans had lost interest in sea service. It was necessary to begin at once the recruiting and training that would man and officer the new ships. Within two months after we entered the war free navigation and engineering schools had been started, and when hostilities ended more than 6,000 men had been graduated, of whom over 3,000 had received officers’ licenses while many others had entered the navy. And in the dozen or more mammoth Naval Reserve Training Stations established and conducted by the Navy Department many thousands of young men were trained for service in all capacities in the merchant marine. In so enormous an undertaking, entered upon with such scanty facilities and carried on under the stress of such urgent need, it was inevitable that the outcome should not always have equaled the hopes and desires of the country and that the zealous efforts and patriotic purposes of those engaged in it should not always have won complete success. But it was an achievement, within a year and a half, of plants enlarged and constructed for the building of ships, of labor trained for that building, of ships built and put into service, and of men trained to officer and man the ships that was a potent factor in the winning of the war. It was an immense and rapid industrial development made possible only by the ardent coöperation of all the factors of the entire national life necessary, under the emergency, to bring it to success. CHAPTER XXIII ORGANIZING THE NATION