In the light of the fact that so few of them profited at all and so many incurred actual loss, it is remarkable that they were not more grasping in the demobilization settlements; but the eternal fact remains that they were inclined to ask for less, rather than more, than was coming to them under their legal rights. This attitude was consistent with their whole attitude during the war. In the history of American industry there is no chapter more creditable to it than that of the attitude and accomplishments of the producers of ordnance during the World War. These men entered the undertaking with a zeal unsurpassed in any other part of the war organization. Working under an urgency such as American industry had never before experienced, they accepted the handicaps that had been placed upon the nation by its own peace-loving traditions and worked together as a unit to overcome the handicaps. They transformed their manufacturing plants with never a thought for the business they would one day have to resume. They undertook to produce, in quantities never before even projected, intricate materials of warfare the very names of which were unfamiliar to them. Despite the mounting costs of materials and labor, they managed to hammer down the prices of rifles, machine guns, explosives, shrapnel, and other important commodities, delivering to the Government not only a superior product, but a product costing the Government less than other nations at war paid for the same things. To accomplish this result they threw their normal rivalries on the scrap heap, opened up their trade secrets to each other, and virtually became partners in the single enterprise of supplying the American troops with the best munitions which American industry could produce. As a rule, the profit-making war contractor was one who supplied commodities essentially like those produced in normal times. But supplies of this sort were almost unknown in the whole range of ordnance. The typical thing was to find on the day of the armistice the ordnance plant which had not yet come into full production under the original contract. This was because of the difficulties encountered in producing the more important items of ordnance. The months of the war had been marked by the heavy expenditure of money in the expansion of plants and the development of processes, and the armistice cut off the development before it had reached the profitable stage.