Strange to relate, nearly the whole of the waste-paper recovered from the household, office and factory was exported, principally to the United States of America, until an American firm, discovering Britain to be a waste-paper mine, established itself in our midst to salvage an appreciable quantity of what we regarded as a nuisance. This refuse was utilized as raw material for the manufacture of paper-boards, the American analogue to our familiar strawboard, to form book covers, stout packing, and to meet other conditions where adequate protection to contents is demanded. This became a prosperous undertaking and afforded merely another instance of how the stranger within our gates has been able to reap material profit at our expense and through our folly. Although this firm absorbed an enormous quantity of our waste-paper it could not cope with the avalanche of this refuse. Many additional thousands of tons were shipped annually to the New World to be worked up. It seems remarkable that the Americans should have found it profitable to collect our residue, to freight it across 3,000 miles of ocean, and to fabricate therefrom their particular range of goods, instead of turning the material available on their own side to such account. But the venture proved decidedly profitable as the results testified. Indeed, it was the enterprise of this pushing firm which first brought home to us the wealth capable of being derived from the commercial exploitation of waste-paper, and which led us to introduce a collecting system upon an organized basis. When the authorities grasped the significance of the waste-paper issue they promptly took steps to retain the whole of the residue in these islands. Export was prohibited; it could only be returned to British mills. A country-wide appeal was made urging every trader and every private citizen to conserve his waste-paper, whether it were used envelopes, newspapers, postcards or fragments of brown paper. So urgent became the demand for this raw material that housewives were requested to ransack their cupboards and lumber-rooms for odds and ends of every description in the paper line--old novels, abandoned magazines and what not; business houses, workshops, and factories were invited to indulge in spring-cleanings to turn out musty files of old letters, receipts, memoranda, obsolete account books and other accumulations; paper hangings stripped from walls in course of redecoration, instead of being burned, were sedulously bagged; even hoardings were divested of their hard thick hides of superimposed posters to provide food for the paper mills. Municipal authorities were urged to participate in the round-up, since it was recognized that imposing quantities of paper evaded all other methods of recovery from inadvertent committal to the dust-bin. In another chapter I have indicated what was done in this direction.