All went well with this informal procedure until the armistice brought the necessity of terminating the war business. The question was, How might the oral and other informal contracts be settled? And then the Comptroller of the Treasury rendered the absolutely stunning decision that all these informal arrangements, including the formal contracts which had been signed by proxies of the constituted contracting officers, were illegal and without standing before the Treasury, and that not a penny of government money could be paid out in settlement of the obligations of the Government under the terms of these agreements, except that the Government could pay for goods actually delivered. At that time the outstanding contracts and agreements of all sorts involved the Government in the sum of approximately $7,500,000,000. The informal contracts, thus declared void, accounted for $1,500,000,000 of this sum. The Government, if it chose, could refuse to reimburse a dollar of hundreds of millions expended freely by patriotic manufacturers, careless of their own interests in their eagerness to give their utmost service to the prosecution of the war. Of course, repudiation of these agreements was unthinkable, if only for the reason that such action would have brought on an unprecedented business panic and sent many concerns crashing down into bankruptcy. Yet the only remedy was legislation to permit the Government to settle up its obligations under these contracts just as if they had been properly drawn in the first place. Such legislation, known as the Dent Act, was eventually passed by Congress, the law being approved by the President on March 2, 1919. In the interim between the armistice and that date, the holders of informal and irregular contracts were subjected to an unavoidable injustice, the nature of which will be plain when we have somewhat examined the War Department’s method of terminating its war industry.