Before hostilities began, the South was allowed to supply itself freely with powder and arms, and for months after they had begun, large supplies of fire-arms were drawn through Kentucky. Down to a recent period the South has continued to receive supplies from Missouri, Virginia, and Tennessee. With these resources, and with a capital drawn from a debt of two hundred millions to the North and West, it has been able to support, for the first fifteen months at least, three hundred thousand men in the field, and successfully to resist, in some cases, the advance of the Federal Army. While these resources lasted, while the blockade was ineffective, while the Confederacy could produce men to replace all who fell, while a paper currency and scrip could be floated, and while the nation hesitated to put forth its strength, the South was able to maintain a strong front, although driven successively from Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Western Virginia, and Tennessee, and thus deprived of nearly half the population and resources on which it originally relied. The enlarged canal of New York, and the great railways which furnish direct routes from the West to the Atlantic, have of late years diverted from the Father of Waters a very large proportion of the exports of the West, but the steamers and flat-boats which floated down the Mississippi literally fed the Cotton States. Laden with corn, flour, and lard, with ploughs, glass, and nails, with horses and mules, and live stock of every description, they distributed their cargoes from Memphis to New Orleans, and came back freighted with sugar and cotton. At length this great commerce has been interrupted, and the South, cut off from this almost indispensable supply of the necessaries of life, is now struggling for existence, and diverts its negroes from the remunerative culture of sugar and cotton to the cultivation of grain and corn. There are few at the North who appreciate the sacrifice which attends this diversion, or the extent of the pressure which led to this disastrous change.