In principle, the Commission was willing to admit the force of the British contention. It asked the British, however, to prepare a more definite statement, showing (1) the average British governmental loss on all steel supplied to manufacturers for the year preceding the armistice, (2) the amount of such steel that went into products sold to America, and, finally, (3) the hidden loss on all steel furnished to America as thus estimated. When the revised statement was presented, it was found to contain items of hidden loss which America could not possibly allow. The British war subsidies went all through their war industry. For instance, in order to stimulate production, the British Government had paid subsidies to the makers of silica brick, used in building steel furnaces. The British asked us to stand a part of this subsidy, inasmuch as some of the shell supplied to us had been produced from furnaces built of subsidized brick. The Commission retorted by asking why Great Britain did not also ask us to share the subsidy on the bread the British steel workers had eaten while they were working on the American artillery and shell orders. In other words, we were willing to pay hidden losses so long as they were not too remotely connected with the American contracts. The Commission also raised the shrewd question, why, since the British were asking us to pay for hidden losses, they did not admit us to the benefits of their “hidden profits”--_viz._, the profit taxes collected from the British steel manufacturers. In the autumn of 1920 General G. W. Burr, the Director of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic after the armistice and a member of the War Department Claims Board, went to England to close up all the outstanding claims existing between the United States and Great Britain as a result of the war. The outcome of his negotiations was the Burr-Niemeyer Agreement, which tied up all loose ends and brought about a final termination of the war business between the two nations. All pending claims were brought into one lump-sum settlement, under the terms of which the United States paid to Great Britain the sum of £2,946,511 2s 8d. This sum settled all the miscellaneous and minor claims noted above; settled, too, the debt owed by the United States to the British for the maintenance of our Siberian Expedition; and settled all other claims, including the hidden-loss claim and a British claim for reimbursement for various “overhead” inspection and storage charges. The settlement figure was much under what the British had originally claimed. In this settlement the hidden-loss and “overhead” claims were paired in a single item which accounted for approximately £1,500,000 of the total paid by the United States. The Burr-Niemeyer Agreement was dated November 23, 1920.