A Northern tourist, who, soon after the close of hostilities, followed the trail of Sherman's army half across the State of Georgia, and explored the Shenandoah Valley from the mountains at its source to the mountains at its foot, thus comments upon the scenes which beguiled the earlier and later moments of his journey: "And this lovely heritage, interspersed by hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, which but as yesterday, under the transforming hand of wealth and art combined, blossomed as the rose, and was lighted by the torch of America's best civilization, now, and under these severe conditions--alas! that we should be driven to concede it--has sunk back into aboriginal unsightliness, and many portions thereof become the fitting abode of those monsters who, warned by an instinct of their nature, shun the haunts of human progress." But not only did this ghost of desolation hold its solemn rounds where wealth and its monumental insignia had erst been set up--more practical subjects were included in the fearful summing up of Federal conquest. The grain crop of four years had been consumed by the requirements of both armies, or ruthlessly committed to the flames through the weak policy of military commanders; export products were sacrificed to confiscation needs; the agricultural districts were bereft of all labor aids, and stood tenantless and barren; nothing of practical value--not even the currency of the country, which had been demonetized months before the events of which we particularly write--greeted the impoverished inhabitant, who, standing in this presence, could scarce look back upon four years of bootless strife with regret unmingled with repining. Slavery, which was undoubtedly a great evil, and is at this period conceded to have been such by its most clamorous apologists of _ante bellum_ times, was nevertheless the great prop of community wealth in those States where it had been recognized by the government; and when (keeping in view the wide-spread destitution to which we have called attention) this pet institution was wrecked on the breakers of war, property affairs in all their borders reached an ebb beyond which, it would have seemed, they could not have been impelled by even a retribution born of that highest example of social evil--State treason. The male inhabitants of the South thus found themselves, at the close of the war, not only stripped of fortune, and all that pertained to a farmer's inheritance, in the strictly agricultural communities to which they belonged, but without business capacity or business employ, had the former been supplied, and under the explicit disfavor of the government administration, in all its branches, with all that that implied.