12 City Homes on Country Lanes 



began to ponder the problem of Reconstruction. He 

 anticipated that millions of men serving in the Army 

 and Navy would be more or less weaned from their 

 old occupations, and that a large proportion of those 

 formerly employed in the factories and workshops 

 would have fallen in love with outdoor life. He thought, 

 too, that many of the places vacated by the selective 

 draft would be filled by permanent occupants when 

 the soldier returned, so that they would find the old 

 familiar doors closed in their faces. It also seemed 

 probable that the cessation of the intense industrial 

 activities of the War would precipitate upon the coun- 

 try an Army of Unemployed, with consequent suffer- 

 ing, throughout a long period of readjustment. 

 Though busily engaged as a member of the Council 

 of National Defense in his part of the work of prose- 

 cuting the War to a successful finish, he yet found 

 time to look beyond that point, and consider what the 

 Government could, or ought, to do, in the way of 

 preparation. 



"Every country has found itself face to face with 

 this situation at the close of a great war," he told 

 the President, in a letter that will be historic. "From 

 Rome under Ca>sar, to France under Napoleon, down 

 even to our Civil War, the problem arose as to what 

 could be done with the soldiers to be mustered out of 

 the military service." 



He looked back to the close of our own Revolution, 

 and recalled how the veterans had threaded their way 

 through the forests of the Alleghenies to make homes 

 in the valley of the Ohio. He recalled the phenomenal 

 settlement in the Mississippi Valley, which followed 



