The preliminary steps in industrial demobilization were taken before the armistice. For one thing, in those final days when it was apparent that the end was close at hand, the War Department adopted the policy of terminating the war contracts by agreement. For that purpose, the war department administration added to the standard contract provisions already adopted standard forms of supplemental agreements, to the end that the liquidation of war industry might be carried out uniformly. On November 9 all production bureaus of the Department were notified to be ready to enforce the termination clauses of contracts when the fighting ended. This order, of course, applied only to those contracts containing termination clauses; but at the same time provision was made for the suspension of war work when the public interest required it. This suspension was to be preliminary to the adoption of arrangements whereby war industry could be gradually stopped down and readjusted by easy stages. On this date, too, the Department adopted a policy from which it never afterwards deviated: not to pay to a producer any profits on prospective production under his contract, but to allow a profit as high as 10 per cent of the cost on work that had actually been done but from which no actual production might have resulted. Thus from the very first the Government showed a spirit of conciliation that promised well for the producers of war supplies. On the morning of November 11, after the receipt of the official news of the armistice, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Director of the United States Shipping Board announced after a conference that all Sunday work and overtime work on government contracts would cease at once, and that war industry would be tapered off by the various procurement agencies in consultation with the Department of Labor and the War Industries Board. These two organizations, the one in contact with employers and the other with labor, were in a position to guard the interests both of labor and of industry. Meanwhile the procurement bureaus of the War Department, following the recent instructions, had sent out generally requests to suspend the manufacture of munitions. These orders were soon modified to allow production to continue at most of the war plants, but the brief interim of idleness gave the procurement officers time to survey the situation and also served as a notice to the manufacturers that the war was over and that they were to incur no further obligations in pursuance of their contracts.