Machinery

The bonus--this bonus--as an issue is past. Senator Walsh of Massachusetts has already introduced a bill for a cash bonus, a harbinger of the future policy of the Democrats--but the insurance bonus is past as an issue. As a problem and a task of administration it has just begun. The Government set to work to solve it. The Veterans' Bureau is in charge of administering the law, but a large part of the work will fall on the War and Navy Departments, which will have to check all applications against their files and authorize the correctness of the certificates on which the Veterans' Bureau makes payment or issues insurance policies. The first steps:

Orders were made out for printing 15,000,000 application blanks and 15,000,000 booklets of information. Ten carloads of paper will be required and the printing will take nearly 30 days.

About 3,500 new clerks will have to be employed--the greater portion of them, 2,800, by the War Department which has to go over the records of 5,250,000 men, now encased in 7,066 steel filing cabinets, weighing 1,080 tons and occupying 2.36 acres of floor space in the old Washington Barracks arsenal. More clerks could profitably be employed, except that they could not get at the cabinets. On each application 27 checking operations have to be made. The matter will be complicated by the fact that the files include 50,328 Smiths, 40,101 Johnsons, 28,902 Browns and 27,938 Williams's, and by the fact that about 23% of those entitled to apply cannot read nor write the English language.

Estimates were rushed on the appropriation which would be needed immediately to carry out the provisions of the Act--the amount being about $120,000,000.

Arrangements were under negotiation with Post Offices and with the American Legion to distribute application blanks and booklets of information in order that everything might be in readiness to issue insurance policies by Jan. 1, 1925, and to pay cash to those entitled to it by March 1 of the same year.