national energies to the work of destruction incident to war, we
as a nation made astonishing progress in many ways other than in
the art of war--in what we might call nation-building.

In some ways we made progress in a year or two that under ordinary
circumstances might have required a generation. A striking
illustration of this is in the development of a great fleet of
merchant ships at a rate that would have been impossible before
the war. Beginning with almost nothing when the war began, we had,
in less than two years, a merchant fleet larger than that of any
other nation, and that in spite of the constant destruction of
ships by the enemy. The chairman of the shipping board of the
United States government says that this is because the necessities
of the war made the whole nation see how much it depends upon
ships, and caused not only ship-builders, but also engineers and
manufacturers and businessmen and the Navy department of the
government, and many others, to concentrate upon this problem,
with the result that we discovered methods of shipbuilding, and of
loading and unloading and operating ships when they were built,
that will probably enable us to maintain permanently a merchant
marine, the lack of which we have deplored for many years.

In a similar way we discovered and brought into use valuable
natural resources of whose existence we had largely been ignorant
and for which we had been dependent upon other nations. We made
astonishing progress in scientific knowledge, and especially in
the application of this knowledge to invention and to industrial
enterprises. We developed a new interest in agriculture, and
learned the food values of many products that had formerly been
neglected. We were led to attack seriously the great problem of