But the industrial conditions of life in the South were very different. Be it remembered that the North was a self-supporting region, both as to foods and manufactured articles, while the South, under slavery, produced raw material, and used that raw stuff to build up factories in England. When the war came the South found herself without the means of supplying her own wants. Within six months the South discovered that every axe and saw and steam-engine and iron rail and bolt and nail had come from the North. Davis sent out men to scurry the country for old stoves and every iron scrap was picked up to be melted into weapons. At the close of the war tenpenny nails were used as five-cent pieces and currency in North Carolina. To crown all other disasters came the debasement of the currency. Macaulay says that the world has suffered less from bad kings than from bad shillings and sixpences. The Confederacy issued one billion dollars of paper money, States issued another flood of promises to pay, cities put out municipal currency, fire and life insurances their shin-plasters, and they kept pouring out paper money until finally all the printing presses broke down. A month before the collapse, a Confederate soldier, returning to his little cabin, paid $10,000 for a fifteen-year-old mule, knee sprung in front and spavined behind, and $7,500 for the shoes for shoeing the mule. Lee's army would have collapsed but for the marvellous heroism, resourcefulness and courage of the Southern women. They took charge of the fields, planted the crops, gathered the harvests, and staggered on to the end. Not one Northern home in five was death-stricken through the war, but practically every Southern home had lost one or two members of the family, through father, son or brother. Nor must we forget what Lee owed to the fidelity of the negroes. Instead of insurrection, arson, pillage and murder in Southern towns and old homesteads, the Southern slave remained true to his mistress, and was the very soul of fidelity. Yet when the war was over, the town had become a wilderness, the plantation a desolation, and where there had been prosperity and even luxury, famine and want and disease had set up their abiding places. Verily secession sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind of destruction.