This fateful decision removed the last obstacle and cleared the right of way to the high ball. The remaining problem was to settle upon a sound principle for determining fair profit. During the busy year 1940, one which could be taken as indicating the return which a plant of our character could earn under other than wartime conditions, we had earned $12,000,000 with a plant provided by our own capital, on sales made of our own initiative, and on shipments that included practically no business with the United States government. If now we were to freeze our annual net earnings at that figure no matter how our sales might soar nor how our plant might be increased at public expense, we would be stabilizing our earnings at an experienced level that seemed capable of justification from the points of view of the stockholder and the public. If in this process we could earn that return and still pay our employees reasonable wages and salaries, then we would be discharging our responsibility to all concerned. As a measure of the effectiveness of this principle we may have recourse to an incident that occurred some months later, when production had begun to roll and costs had cascaded to unprecedentedly low levels. After assembling the figures, we had advised the Bureau formally that, effective at the beginning of the next quarter, we would reduce invoice prices below the contract fixed prices by a certain figure per engine calculated to avoid any accumulation of excessive profits. The total relinquishment of potential profits was calculated to amount to approximately $10,000,000. Meanwhile, we had adjusted wages and salaries on a merit basis for all except top executives. On the day this news appeared I was making one of my customary tours through the shop when one of the workers detached himself from a big Bullard machine and headed out to cut me off in the aisle. He was a big brute with beetling black eyebrows and a sullen mouth, yet as he caught up with me the hard look melted away before a big grin and he stuck out a grimy fist. “Mister,” he said, gripping my hand in his big paw, “I’d go to hell for a company that won’t profiteer. And, mister,” he added, “that goes for a lot of other guys in this shop, too.”