The producers did not attempt to recoup in the business liquidation that followed. These sentences are not intended to give a clean bill of health to the whole body of ordnance producers--some few of them sought to get more than they were morally entitled to get; some few, like the country horse trader, adopted the age-old procedure of barter by asking more than they expected to get. But where one man held out for the last penny of his rights, there could be found half a dozen others who put in no claims at all for money to which they were justly entitled. The great steel-producing industry, in particular, showed an aristocratic contempt of requiring its full due. Many steel producers pocketed their losses without a word: in fact, the Government settled a surprising number of ordnance contracts for the statutory one dollar apiece and thus saved itself millions for which it was legally liable. When the curious ordnance officers asked some of these contractors why they did not claim their full rights, they responded that the victory over Germany was compensation enough for them. As one of them expressed it, the achievements of the American boys in France had given him his run for his money. In the Pittsburg district two steel producers had been engaged on contracts for essentially the same sort of material and on about the same scale. One was a small concern which had been kept at its wits’ end most of the time to finance its war enterprise. The other was one of the largest corporations in the United States, with ample financial resources. Into the Ordnance Claims Board came two claims terminating contracts of approximately identical characteristics. One of the claims was several times larger than the other, and naturally the Washington authorities questioned the larger claim. They found that the latter was a just claim in every particular. The discovery was made that the smaller of the two claims had asked for an amount in settlement much below what the producer was entitled to receive. The larger claim had been submitted by the producer whose finances could not stand any loss; the smaller by the great corporation referred to above. Both were allowed in full. Of the 317 large ordnance contracts in the Pittsburg district, the Government settled 149, involving a total obligation of more than $23,000,000, for $1.00 each. In this and other districts thousands of subcontractors forgave the prime contractors their legal obligations without the transfer of a penny. In the Philadelphia district the prime contractors cleared up thousands of their subcontracts and said nothing about them in their liquidation claims. These instances of generosity were discovered only when the Ordnance Department checked up to find out why the final settlement costs were so much lower than the preliminary estimate of those costs, made in the first hurried days after the armistice.