The next difficulty with which the people of Georgia had to contend was the Conscription Act. This act passed the Confederate Congress in April, 1862. It had been recommended by Mr. Davis in a special message, and Congress promptly passed it. Nobody in Georgia could understand why such a law had been recommended, or why it had passed. It was the most ruinous blunder of the Confederate Government during the war. If such a law was necessary, it showed that the Confederacy had fallen to pieces. If it was not necessary, its enactment was a stupendous piece of folly; and such it turned out to be. Under the last call for troops for Confederate service, Governor Brown had no difficulty in furnishing eighteen regiments. He could have gone on furnish ing troops as long as there was any fighting material left in the State; but as soon as the Conscript Act went into operation, the ardor of the people sensibly cooled. The foolish law not only affected the people at home, but hurt the army in the field. It was a reflection on the patriotism of the whole Southern population. The law was the occasion of a controversy between Governor Brown and President Davis, in which Brown, in the nature of things, had a decided advantage; for the Conscript Act wiped out the whole theory of State rights, on which the people of the South depended to justify secession. But Georgia did not stand in the way of the law. It was enforced, and the terms of its enforcement did the work of disorganization more thoroughly than the hard times and the actual war were doing it. In March, 1863, the governor issued a proclamation convening the Legislature in special session to discuss the subject of bread. This was a very important subject at that time. In his message, the governor said that the time had come for the farmers to raise bread instead of cotton. He also laid before the Legislature' the reports of the distribution of the fund of two and a half millions of dollars for the support of the indigent families of soldiers. These reports showed what havoc the war had created among the people of a State which, not much more than two years before, was one of the most prosperous in the country. The fund had been distributed among more than eighty-four thousand people. Of this number, about forty-six thousand were children, twenty-four thousand were kinswomen of poor living soldiers, eight thousand were orphans, four thousand were widows of dead soldiers, and five hundred were soldiers disabled in service. Governor Brown, out of his own barn, gave the people of Cherokee County four thousand dollars' worth of corn. These events show the straits to which the people had been reduced by two years of actual war.