All this want of coördination facilitated speculation. We shall see hereafter how merciless this speculation became and we shall even hear of profits on food rising to more than four hundred per cent. However, the oft-quoted prices of the later years--when, for instance, a pair of shoes cost a hundred dollars--signify little, for they rested on an inflated currency. None the less they inspired the witticism that one should take money to market in a basket and bring provisions home in one's pocketbook. Endless stories could be told of speculators hoarding food and watching unmoved the sufferings of a famished people. Said Bishop Pierce, in a sermon before the General Assembly of Georgia, on Fast Day, in March, 1863: "Restlessness and discontent prevail.... Extortion, pitiless extortion is making havoc in the land. We are devouring each other. Avarice with full barns puts the bounties of Providence under bolts and bars, waiting with eager longings for higher prices.... The greed of gain ... stalks among us unabashed by the heroic sacrifice of our women or the gallant deeds of our soldiers. Speculation in salt and bread and meat runs riot in defiance of the thunders of the pulpit, and executive interference and the horrors of threatened famine." In 1864, the Government found that quantities of grain paid in under the tax as new-grown were mildewed. It was grain of the previous year which speculators had held too long and now palmed off on the Government to supply the army. Amid these desperate conditions the fate of soldiers' families became everywhere a tragedy. Unless the soldier was a land-owner his family was all but helpless. With a depreciated currency and exaggerated prices, his pay, whatever his rank, was too little to count in providing for his dependents. Local charity, dealt out by state and county boards, by relief associations, and by the generosity of neighbors, formed the barrier between his family and starvation. The landless soldier, with a family at home in desperate straits, is too often overlooked when unimaginative people heap up the statistics of "desertion" in the latter half of the war.