In Illinois, Iowa, or Indiana, the farmer can grow rich while selling his corn for ten cents per bushel, and it is now common for a man and a boy to cultivate a hundred acres and to gather five thousand bushels in a single season. The South does not possess the rich and exhaustless soil of the prairies, which for half a century will yield without return successive and luxuriant crops of corn. Its soil is generally light and easily exhausted, and is tilled by the rude and unwilling labor of the slave. The census apprises us that its average crop of corn is but fifteen bushels to the acre, in place of fifty to sixty in Illinois, and even this depends in part on guano or artificial stimulants. The average yield of wheat south of Tennessee is but six bushels to the acre, in place of twenty to forty in Ohio. The Southern planters, who can sell cotton with profit at ten cents per pound, cannot produce corn for less than one dollar per bushel, or tenfold the cost in the West, and in past years a dollar has been the customary price from North Carolina to Texas. Before the war, the cotton-crop of the South had risen to five millions of bales; but now four-fifths of the land in cultivation is devoted to corn and grain. In place of five millions of bales, worth at former prices two hundred millions of dollars, and at present rates at least eight hundred millions, the South, in its folly, to the injury of the world, and the ruin of most of its planters, is now producing, in place of its cotton, less corn than could be furnished in Illinois in ordinary seasons for twenty millions of dollars. But even this is inadequate to the wants of its people and its stock. Its small farmers are diverted from the cultivation of the soil. The conscript-law is drafting all the able-bodied white men into the army. The States from Tennessee and North Carolina to Texas have neither pasture nor mowing; their feeble stock gains but a precarious livelihood from the cane-brakes or weeds of the forests and Northern hay. Corn and grain were transported by railway more than three hundred miles into the interior. The writer has stood beside a yoke of Georgia oxen in Atlanta so small that they might well pass for calves at the North. Two Illinois steers would weigh down a half-dozen such animals. But, diminutive as they are, they, as well as the people of the South, require Northern supplies. And at this moment their last dependence is placed upon the valley of Virginia and the valleys of East Tennessee. Let us hope that the Union armies which now possess Nashville, Memphis, and Cumberland Gap may soon occupy Knoxville.