The work to be done required as much expansion in personnel as in buildings. From all over the country people went to Washington to put their hands, their heads, their shoulders, to the rushing forward of the Government’s war program. There was something almost magical in the suddenness of their appearance and the steadiness with which this stream of humanity poured into the capital. From East and West and North and South came these thousands of men and women, from the seaboards and the mountains, from the middle plains and valleys--business men, captains of industry, lawyers, physicians, bankers, clergymen, college professors, magazine editors, scientific and technical experts, artists, authors, journalists, librarians, welfare workers, stenographers, secretaries, clerks, and each and every one of them found all that his or her hands could do. A great many of them, more than will ever be known, gave their services and the rest received salaries that were hardly more than sufficient, as prices were in wartime Washington, to cover their expenses. They were representative Americans, the cream of America in ability, training, character, patriotism and devotion to democratic ideals, and to see them at their work, to come into touch with their enthusiasm, their eagerness to render service, their teeming ideas, their resourcefulness, their efficiency, energy and determination and to witness the effective running and vast achievements of the huge organizations they were inspiring and directing was to watch the steady, sure beating of the very heart of the nation. In April, 1917, Washington had a population of 360,000, with scant facilities for receiving and caring for the army of workers that almost at once began to stream into it. At the end of the next seven months a careful census that did not include transients nor men in camps within the city showed that 50,000 people had been added to the population. And they were still coming in answer to the need of departments and boards and commissions for more, and more, and ever more workers to carry on every phase of the planning, directing and speeding of the war. The War Department alone had 25,000 civilians in its employ. Each of the other great war agencies was using two, three, five or six thousand men and women, and each of them was still expanding. At the end of the first year of war the population of Washington had been increased by 90,000, and probably twenty or thirty thousand more were added before the signing of the armistice. Thus the capital’s population was increased during the year and a half by about one-third of its initial size. And, altogether, the expansion in building and population during that brief time makes a story more sensational than that of any mining town which ever leaped suddenly into world-wide fame.