companionship at the camp
fireside; for he saw famine stalk gaunt and pale through what had been
his home.

When tidings of want and misery came, he strove to bear them. When he
heard of burning and outrage--where naught was left to plunder--who may
wonder that he sometimes fled from duty to his country, to that duty
more sacred to him of saving his wife and children!

Who does not wonder, rather, in reading the history of those frightful
days, that desertions were so few--that untutored human nature could
hide in its depths such constancy and devotion to principle!

But, great as were the privation and the suffering caused by the first
conscription, they were still to be increased. Through those twin
abortions of legislation, the substitute and exemption bills, the
results of the first law proved inadequate to fill the gaps of the
fatal fights of the summer.

Detail and substitute had done their work, as thoroughly as had the
shells of Malvern Hill, the bullets of Sharpsburg, or the raw corn of
the retreat to the river.

More men were wanted! At whatever cost in territory, or in suffering,
more men must be had. And on the 27th September, Congress passed an
act extending the age of conscription from 18 to 45 years. But the
exemption and substitute laws remained as effective as ever. True,
some feeble moves were made toward narrowing the limits of the former;
but while it stood a law in any form, enough could be found to read it
in any way. The extension law, while it still further drained the
almost exhausted country--and left in its track deeper suffering and
destitution, that brought famine from a comparative term into an actual
verity--still left in the cities an able-bodied and numerous class;
who, if not actually useless, were far more so than the food-producing
countrymen sent to the front to take their places.

Yet so blind was the Congress--so impervious to the sharpest teachings
of necessity and so deaf to the voice of common sense and reason, that
unceasingly upbraided it--that this state of things continued more than
a year from the passage of the extension act.

Then, when it was almost too late for human aid to save the cause--when
the enemy had not only surrounded the contracted territory on every
side, but had penetrated into its very heart--the substitute bill was
repealed, and every man in the land between the ages of 18 and 45,
declared a Confederate soldier subject to service. Then, too, the