No considerations of future reserves of finished materials affected the demobilization of the extensive war industry which was manufacturing our rifles, machine guns, pistols, and the ammunition for them. The production of these articles had been so successful that the moment the war ended the supplies on hand were sufficient for the permanent Army for years to come, with reserve supplies heavy enough to arm a large field force. The interests of the Army, considered alone, therefore, demanded the immediate cessation after the armistice of all this manufacture; but economic considerations and the dictates of good business practice made it expedient to taper off this production gradually, even at the cost of producing more materials than the War Department could possibly use. Special problems arose in the liquidation of this great industry. In the first place, the factories which made rifles and machine guns were sharply specialized for just this work, making it difficult for them to turn to any commercial production with the same equipment. Several of these plants were specially created for the war work, and therefore had no prewar occupation to which they could turn. It was necessary for them either to close out entirely (as the Eddystone rifle plant of the Midvale Steel & Ordnance Company near Philadelphia actually did do) or to develop some new product. Two of the small-arms plants after the armistice added departments for the manufacture of ball bearings, one went into the production of automobile accessories and sporting arms, and a fourth (which had made bayonets) took up the manufacture of cutlery. It was necessary to give these concerns time to work out these conversions, if an acute problem in unemployment were to be avoided. The sharp centralization of the small-arms industry in the East was another factor which influenced the Government to permit an unwelcome production after the armistice. Most of the rifles, for instance, were manufactured within a small area in the state of Connecticut. The Winchester plant at New Haven employed 20,000 operatives, the Remington plant at Bridgeport 12,000, and there were several others of this size. To close them all up forthwith would have created a bad industrial situation in this busy and prosperous section of New England. The policy adopted, therefore, was to taper off the production of such materials. Upon the signing of the armistice ten American plants were engaged exclusively in the production of automatic arms. They employed 20,000 persons. They had reached a daily output of more than 1,100 machine guns and automatic rifles on contracts calling for the delivery of 650,000 such weapons, at a projected cost of $193,000,000, of which 465,000 guns were as yet undelivered. The final cancellations stopped the production of 382,000 guns, making the total war production 268,000 guns. In the various plants the Government had invested $11,000,000 in machinery.