The central offices of the Food Administration in Washington expanded amazingly as the country leaped to its support and asked for instruction, advice and guidance. It began, a month or more after our entrance into the war, in two rooms, with a Food Administrator, whose office was informal and tentative until Congress in August authorized the program of food control, and two or three assistants. By the first of January it filled a huge structure holding over a thousand employees and in the following summer it crowded both this and another building of equal size. It finally had in its service nearly 8,000 employees and under its coördinating hand were the purchase and control of food-stuffs whose value amounted to $300,000,000 per month. To its staff came men and women of expert knowledge from all over the country, many of them giving voluntary service,--university professors who were specialists in food and other economic subjects, journalists, magazine editors, office experts, scientists whose specialties would throw light upon one or another phase of the food problem. The Food Administration dealt with prices in the food trades, which were prevented from sky-rocketing above the levels caused by war conditions, and with speculation and profiteering by means of a system of licenses applying to all persons engaged in the importation, manufacture, storage and distribution of certain staple foods and including retailers doing more than $100,000 yearly business. The purpose of the system was to stabilize prices by limiting those charged to a reasonable amount over expense, by preventing the storing of food in large quantities in the hope of speculative profits on a rising market, by keeping all food commodities moving from producer to consumer with as little delay from unnecessary business transactions as possible and by limiting as far as practicable dealings in contracts for future delivery. Every licensee was required to make reports of his dealings once a month and none was allowed to keep on hand or under control food-commodity supplies for more than a certain term in advance, set, with some exceptions, at sixty days. Retailers doing less than $100,000 business annually were exempt from the licensing system but were forbidden by the Food Control Act to hoard or waste food or to charge excessive prices. In the neighborhood of 100,000 licenses were taken out and of all these only an insignificant percentage were ever found guilty of breaking the provisions of the law. Equally rare were attempts to break or evade the law by retail dealers. Nearly all of even these small numbers were brought back to right feeling and right action merely by confronting the violater with proof of his wrong doing. As punishment, if punishment was necessary, his license was revoked or suspended, or there was forced sale of his hoardings, or his place of business was closed for a period, or he was required