e in
the large, and of wide acquaintance in the city. Simultaneously, Bok
secured the release of one of the ablest men in the Y. M. C. A. service
in New York, Edward S. Wilkinson, who became the permanent secretary of
the Philadelphia Committee. Bok organized a separate committee composed
of automobile manufacturers to recruit for chauffeurs and mechanicians;
another separate committee recruited for physical directors, and later a
third committee recruited for women.

The work was difficult because the field of selection was limited. No
men between the military ages could be recruited; the War Boards at
Washington had drawn heavily upon the best men of the city; the
slightest physical defect barred out a man, on account of the exposure
and strain of the Y. M. C. A. work; the residue was not large.

It was scarcely to be wondered at that so many incompetent secretaries
had been passed and sent over to France. How could it have been
otherwise with the restricted selection? But the Philadelphia Committee
was determined, nevertheless, that its men should be of the best, and it
decided that to get a hundred men of unquestioned ability would be to do
a greater job than to send over two hundred men of indifferent quality.
The Committee felt that enough good men were still in Philadelphia and
the vicinity, if they could be pried loose from their business and home
anchorages, and that it was rather a question of incessant work than an
impossible task.

Bok took large advertising spaces in the Philadelphia newspapers, asking
for men of exceptional character to go to France in the service of the
Y. M. C. A.; and members of the Committee spoke before the different
commercial bodies at their noon luncheons. The applicants now began to
come, and the Committee began its discriminating selection. Each
applicant was carefully questioned by the secretary before he appeared
before the Committee, which held sittings twice a week. Hence of over
twenty-five hundred applicants, only three hundred appeared before the
Committee, of whom two hundred and fifty-eight were passed and sent
overseas.

The Committee's work was exceptionally successful; it soon proved of so
excellent a quality as to elicit a cabled request from Paris
headquarters to send more men of the Philadelphia type. The secret of
this lay in the sterling personnel of the Committee itself, and its
interpretation of the standards required; and so well did it work that
when Bok