When the war came and he was carrying the terrible burden of the Revolution, he learned the same lesson in a new and more bitter way. Nothing went so near to wreck the American cause as lack of all the supplies by which war was carried on, for the United States produced little or nothing of what was then needed. The resources of the northern colonies were soon exhausted, and the South had none. Powder, cannon, muskets, clothing, medical stores, all were lacking, and the fate of the nation hung trembling in the balance on account of the dependence in which the colonies had been kept by the skillful policy of England. These were teachings that a lesser man than Washington would have taken to heart and pondered deeply. In the midst of the struggle he wrote to James Warren (March 31, 1779): "Let vigorous measures be adopted, ... to punish speculators, forestallers, and extortioners, and, above all, to sink the money by heavy taxes, to promote public and private economy, and _to encourage manufactures_.[1] Measures of this sort, gone heartily into by the several States, would strike at once at the root of all our evils, and give the _coup de grâce_ to the British hope of subjugating this continent either by their arms or their acts." [Footnote 1: The italics are mine.] To Lafayette he wrote in 1789: "Though I would not force the introduction of manufactures by extravagant encouragements and to the prejudice of agriculture, yet I conceive much might be done in that way by women, children, and others, without taking one really necessary hand from tilling the earth. Certain it is, great savings are already made in many articles of apparel, furniture, and consumption. Equally certain it is, that no diminution in agriculture has taken place at this time, when greater and more substantial improvements in manufactures are making than were ever before known in America."