This was the proposition extended to the manufacturer when the Government proposed to him the voluntary termination of his contract. Most of the contractors received the terms favorably: they did not wish to collect money for work not done, even though theirs was the technically legal right to do so. If any producer balked at the policy, he always had the remedy of seeking his full pound of flesh in the Court of Claims. However, the slowness of procedure in the Court of Claims made this a weak remedy; and even if the Court of Claims finally granted him his exactions, then he must wait for his money until Congress passed an act appropriating it from the Treasury. Only recently Congress passed a bill to reimburse the estate of a long-deceased individual who was wrongfully deprived of a horse during the Civil War. Such was the prospect which faced the contractor unwilling to accept the War Department’s terms of settlement. With this coercive potentiality in the Government’s position, the Government itself fixed the terms of settlement, at least in broad outline; but the terms were, in the main, fair to all concerned. The district boards proved to be able to liquidate most of the contracts without dispute. From these boards the settlement agreements went up for approval first to the bureau claims boards and finally to the War Department Claims Board, with certain exceptions to be noted later. If agreements could not be reached by the district boards, appeals could be taken to the bureau boards and, after them, to the War Department Claims Board. The last-named body designated one of its members to sit with each bureau board and to exercise the authority of the War Department Claims Board in approving all settlements after action by the bureau board. The approval of the special member, acting in the name of the Secretary of War, constituted the final step in the settlement, which then passed to the finance officers for payment. Thus only a few of the 27,000 suspended contracts reached the War Department Claims Board for detailed consideration. Nearly all of them came up to the highest authority as agreed-upon settlements, needing only the approval of the proper special member of the War Department Claims Board before being embodied within the original contracts as supplementary agreements. Occasionally questions of fact arose as to the fidelity of a contractor’s performance under the terms of his contract. Such questions were carried by appeal, not to the War Department Claims Board, but to the Department’s Board of Contract Adjustment, which, it will be remembered, was, by inference, set up as arbiter of such questions by one of the standard contract provisions. The Board of Contract Adjustment had other and more important duties in connection with the industrial liquidation, as will be shown later.