The next provision dealt with indemnifications for the invasion of patent rights. The fifteenth provided for the settlement of disputes and claims arising out of questions of performance or nonperformance under contracts. Later the Board of Contract Adjustment was organized to fulfill this function. The next three provisions dealt with hours of labor, the settlement of wage disputes, and the conditions of labor at war plants. Then came a provision requiring the producer to make periodic reports of the progress of his work, one defining what costs would be allowed in a cost-plus contract, one allowing the contractor to appeal to the Board of Contract Adjustment in the event that a contracting officer of the Department disallowed costs in excess of $5,000, one providing for uniformity in contractors’ cost accounting, one forbidding the payment of wages above current local rates, and a final provision vesting in the United States the title to all materials in course of manufacture under a cost-plus contract. Such were the standard contract provisions, protective and fair to the Government and the producers alike. They were not adopted until the end of the summer of 1918, and therefore no important amount of government business was placed on their identical terms. As stated, however, most of their requirements in substance had been written into the war department contracts previously drawn. The cost-plus contract under which the immense building construction program of the War Department was carried through was of a peculiar form, not used elsewhere. It was known as the cost-plus-with-sliding-scale-and-fixed-maximum-fee contract. The distinguishing feature of it was that each contractor was paid a percentage of the cost as profit up to the extent of a fixed maximum profit, and he could not be paid more than this profit whatever the cost of the job. The profit percentage diminished on a sliding scale as the cost mounted. In its latest form this contract paid a profit of 7 per cent to contractors on jobs costing less than $100,000, and the profit declined gradually in percentage until it reached the low mark of 2½ per cent paid as profit for work costing more than $9,650,000. No building contractor, however, could be paid more than $250,000 profit on a job, whatever its cost; and out of his “profit” he still had to pay his overhead operating expenses. In its building program the War Department became one of the largest employers of labor in the country, and its building contract was roundly attacked as a chief element in the swift rise in wages. To meet this attack the Department convened a board of construction engineers and other experts to study the contract. Instead of condemning the form of contract, the report of this board endorsed it in unqualified terms and declared that, if anything, the contract tended to check extravagances in the work.