should only be used during one-sixth of the year, when it would be injured far less by being kept constantly in running order than by remaining idle. The new steam mills are so vastly superior, in every point of view, to the old horse mills, that they have been adopted on the greater portion of the sugar plantations, and every planter is desirous of having them; but they are enormously expensive, and the planters must manage in some manner to agree to have a mill in each populous neighborhood to do the crushing and refining for all their acres. The division of the large plantations into small farms seems, sooner or later, inevitable; as no one owner can, under the new condition of things, make the necessary and continuous outlay. In a few years the cane now crushed by one of these immense sugar houses in the winter months will belong, in small lots, to a hundred different men, instead of to the one aristocratic and wealthy planter, as under the old régime. The testimony of most of the planters in Louisiana is that the free negro works well, and earns his wages, save when he engages in political effort. There are none who are willing to assert that free labor has not been a success; and the majority would along the beds of the drills when the spring plowing begins, and each one of the sprouts at the joints is carefully watched and cultured that it may produce a new cane. A great portion of the crop is thus reserved for seed each year. Then Nelson will show you how, if the cane has escaped the accidents of the seasons, it is cut down and brought in its perfection to the sugar-house; how all hands, black and white, join in "hauling" it from the fields for many days, and then keep the mill going night and day for a week; how there is high wassail and good cheer in the intervals of the work, and every nerve is strained to the completion of the task. He will show you the great crushers which crush the sweetness out of the fresh canes as they are carried forward upon an endless series of rollers; then will point out the furnace into which the refuse of the cane is carried and burned, thus furnishing the motive power for the destruction of the cane which follows. The baggasse, as this refuse is called, usually furnishes steam enough to drive the sugar-mills and leaves nothing but a kind of coke in the ash-pit of the furnace. Coal is used in the refining mill's furnace. Out from the crushed arteries of the cane wells a thick, impure liquid, which demands immediate attention to preserve it from spoiling; and then the clarifying process is begun and continued, by the aid of hundreds of ingenious mechanisms, whose names even you will not remember when Nelson takes you into the refinery. You enter a huge set of chambers, the floors of which are sticky with expressed sugar, and watch the juice passing through various processes in great open trays, through copper and iron steam-pipes; now trickling down filter-pans filled with bone dust; now wandering through separators, and then through the bone dast again; onward toward granulation in the vacuum pans, and finally into coolers where the sugar is kept in a half liquid state by means of revolving paddles until it comes to the final vessels in which, by rapid whirlings, all the molasses is thrown out, and, leaving the dry sugar ready for commerce, goes wandering among the pipes under the floors, and round and round again through the whirling machines, until there is no suspicion of sweetness in it, and it is ignominiously released. It seems a pity that such fine machinery THE FRENCH 1ARKET.-THE HEN TRADER. prefer it, if the State were in a settled condition, to the most arbitrary days of ownership. It is, nevertheless, evident that political excitements, gotten up by adventurers with the hope of obtaining power, take the negro's attention a good deal from his work, and constitute a species of mild intellectual dissipation, which he thinks it vastly fine to indulge in, but which only unfits him for serious efforts at progress, and wrongfully elevates him and his fellows into a party directly opposed to the interests of his fellow citizens. revolution, he sits haughtily tranquil, wrapped in reserve, save when he ventures to predict the downfall of the Republic, and to lament the despotism under which he asserts that he is kept. He is fond of gloomy horoscopes, and delights in announcing to the world that the precedent established in Louisiana by the Lynch returning board and the Durell decision will yet be disastrous to New York or Massachusetts. He is not more glad to be rid of slavery than he would be to see the last negro vanish from Judging from conversations with a num- the soil. He is weary of the whole subject ber of persons, there is not much hope of black versus white; anxious for immigrathat in the present condition of affairs the tion, yet faithless of its practical results; equality of races will be thoroughly recog- willing to guarantee, to the extent allowed nized by the white man in Louisiana. He by his impaired fortunes, any reasonable will not admit that the negro is really com- enterprise tending toward the commercial petent to legislate for him in any manner, development of the State, but discouraged, or to vote with him on matters of common and oftentimes distracted. He is told to importance to white and black.* While he help himself, but is powerless, and rehas no desire to see any of the conditions sents all invitations to frankly join with of that kind of society, which prevailed the dominant party as insults. Impulsive, before the war, re-established, he refuses to intensely individual, and sensitive in high recognize degree, he fancies that he sees fresh humilior acqui- ations in a thousand changes, which are esce in the but the inevitable attendants of the revoluactual con- tion. In the parishes the tyranny of the newdition of comers who use the new political element affairs. for base purposes, is constantly increasing Having in boldness and violence; it is now manifest been, as in a Gargantuan appetite for theft; and now he consid- in an outrageous stifling of some punishment ers, doom- richly merited by an infamous scoundrel. ed by the Sometimes the negro, annoyed and per THE FRENCH MARKET.-SELLING GUMBO. *This statement may need modification at a later day, but at present it is the truth. The white man in Louisiana admits that the black man has a right to vote, and, even to sit in the legislative assemblies; but that he is competent to vote or legislate intelligently, or ever is likely to be, the white man plexed by the tangled condition. of affairs, takes the reins into his own hands, and then follow scenes of bloodshed and violence; then comes to the front the grisliest question of black versus white, and the commonwealth is, even as when the Legislature is in session, convulsed to its center. Meantime professional politicians and lobbyists constantly arrange new plans for the pacification of difficulties, for compromises never to be effected, and victories never to be won; the State goes onward to a ruin which seems likely to be permanent, and no one manifests the power to master rigidly denies, and, when pressed to declare his belief, will always tell you so. He declines, as a rule, to believe in the capabilities of the negro, and does not see anything in the future for the unfortunate black to indicate progress towards intelligent self-government. THE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA. circumstances and arrest the downward progress. The citizens are willing to work-are anxious to work-but they are held down. All their praiseworthy ambition is neutralized by the incubus of a Legislature which in no wise properly represents the people. The negro afield, with his sturdy family around him, cultivating the little plot which has at last become his, and the white man, with his own hand to the plow, showing that he no longer thinks labor degrading, are gratifying sights which present themselves from time to time; but they are by no means as common as they would be if the State were not constantly anguishstricken, overwhelmed with taxation and a myriad debts, and hindered from making the improvements necessary to the securing of new trade and consequent prosperity. There are in Louisiana men of brilliant and audacious eloquence; men of entrain and magnetism, who seem fashioned for leadership; and yet, strange as it may appear, who take but little interest in the affairs of their own State; and who either content themselves with deriding their inferiors, or with watching chances for their personal elevation, by taking advantage of the weakness or insincerity of those in power. They laugh at the discomfiture of their fellows, while the house is being pulled down over their own heads. With anarchy at their doors, they refuse to make the first step toward reconciliation, or a proper understanding between the races now so equally divided as to numbers within the State limits. The resistance to taxation, which began with the present year, was pretty effectually checked by the proclamation of the President which virtually made such resistance dangerous. People who wish to keep in their hands what little property remains to them are compelled in one manner or another to pay up. There is some hope at present for the administration of the metropolis. Economy has been begun in earnest, but even economy will be but of small avail for a year or two, for the sums expended around the City Hall in New Orleans were so enormous that gradual reduction will not relieve the people much. The budget of 1872 provided for the payment of the sum of $229,000 to the various employés about the City Hall, or more than is annually paid to the President, Vice-President, judges of the Supreme Court, and cabinet officers of the United States, and the State officers of Louisiana. There was a veritable army of office-holders and dependents about the municipal headquarters. The government of the city is at present entirely vested in a Mayor, and seven "administrators," respectively charged with the administration of finance, commerce, improvements, assessments, police, public accounts, and water works and public buildings. These eight gentlemen constitute what is known as the City Council, and are elected biennially, at the time of the election for members of the General Assembly. The famous Board of Metropolitan Police, created by Warmoth, is in no manner under the direction of the City Council, the administrator of the police department being merely an exofficio member of that board. The Metropolitan police constitute a body directed by a board controlled by the State Executive, and is paid by taxes levied upon the city. It is in reality an armed military force which the central State government maintains in the capital for the enforcement of its measures and the prevention of riots. Since Warmoth created it, its cost has been enormous, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly. The police expenses for the year ending October 1st, 1869, were $930,809.09; for 1870, $725,357.73; and for 1871, about $800,000. The municipality constantly threatens rebellion against the control of its action by State interference, but meantime that control increases in strength and extent. The speculation in warrants, the creation of certain courts out of elements diametrically opposed to the real interests of the people of the State, are also evils which are even worse than they have been represented by the injured, and for which there is no excuse. The Federal Government may and should protect the freedman in the rights given him by the revolution consequent on the war; but it should not permit the use of ignorant masses of negroes as stepping-stones to tyrannical, centralized power; it should not allow interlopers to array the black freedman against the white freeman, under any pretense whatso ever. The condition of the State finances is somewhat difficult to give an account of. It was stated in 1872 that the amount of the actual funded and unfunded debt was between $24,000,000 and $25,000,000; that the contingent liabilities amounted to $5, 483,602; and that the amount of bonds "authorized" by the Legislature but not yet issued was $10,770,000, making a total of actual, contingent, and prospective liability which is far from cheering, especially as since 1860 the valuation of property in the State decreased from $435,000,000 to $250,000,000 in 1871. With the awful possibility of a war of races constantly thrusting its ugly head into the light, it is easy to perceive how industrial development is hindered in, and capital is frightened away from all the parishes of the State; it is easy to see how passions, which should have long since become extinct, still smoulder, and are ready at a moment's warning to burst forth at white heat of anarchy and chaos. It is now and then asserted that corruption, consequent upon despair and disgust, has affected the ranks of the native born citizens; and that there have been cases where even they have crowded the lobbies of the hybrid legislature, lobbying in the interests of corporations. This seems hardly credible, when it is remembered that the masses of the conservative citizens vehemently assert that the returning board which established that legislature in power had no official statements in its possession on which to base its conclusion, and since they are supported in their assertion by the declaration of a Committee of the United States Senate that the Lynch returning board's canvass "had no semblance of integrity." The despair born of the numerous attempts of the last few years at the obtaining of reliable labor to carry on large enterprises finally culminated in one energetic effort to secure emigration. "The Louisiana Emigration and Homestead Company," officered by Gen. G. T. Beauregard and other prominent citizens, is working in carnest to regenerate the State through the revival of her industries and the settlement of her waste lands. They propose to employ every possible means for inducing intelligent white immigration, and have adopted in their charter a provision by which immigrants may acquire, at small cost and without trouble, homesteads of their own. It is a garden spot, O penniless friends of other climes! It is the place for the hardy and frugal vigneron from Alsatia and Lorraine; for the sturdy German, whom climate does not seem to soften and render effeminate as it does his other European brethren; it is the place for the small farmer of the North, whose whole life is a battle against stones and frost. While New York or Wisconsin furnish less than five months of ordinary farmingweather annually, Lousiana can give ten; and her soil affords the farmer profitable essay in every variety of tropical culture. With twenty thousand miles of inland, river, lake and bayou navigation, the facilities for transportation from point to point in the interior are hardly surpassed by those of the elder States. But Louisiana needs more outlets than her trade at present possesses. She needs more railroads opening up certain attractive sections, and needs them at once. Her legislatures of the past few years have failed to accomplish the necessary progress. Vast and formidable interests have now and then barred the outlets which are at this moment pressed upon from without and within. Thirty years ago, the State possessed but one railroad, that running to Lake Pontchartrain; now it has the superb line, formerly known as the New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western, and at present called "Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad." This splendid commercial highway, as well built and equipped as any in the world, and communicating at Brashear City on Berwick's Bay with a fleet of fifteen first-class iron sea-going steamers, running to Texas ports, opened up one of the finest regions in Louisiana; and before the war might literally have been said to run through one of the richest gardens of the world. All the appointments of the line are of the most complete order; and the emigration alone from the older to the newer Southern States would suffice to make such enormous investment pay, while that is but a tithe of the business poured through that channel. an idle plantation and deserted sugarhouse; past" Tigerville," with its Indian mounds, Terrebonne, and Chacahoula Swamp-a wilderness of shriveled cypresses and stagnant water-past La Fourche Bayou, on which lies the pretty, Frenchy, cultured town of Thibodaux; past Raceland, with its moist black fields and wideextended sugar and rice plantations; over the reed-grown and water-saturated expanse of the "Trembling Prairie," dotted with live oaks and stretches of cypress timber; past Bayou des Allemands, and a land filled with small still pools of deep black water; and so on and on until the traveler would see the long, dark lines of smoke against the cloudless sky, which indicated that he was nearing the Mississippi River. As far as the eye could reach, in either direction, he would see green fields, dotted with low white houses, lying amid groves of orange trees. Then he would come suddenly upon the roar and bustle of Algiers, and would cross the great ferry to the landing on the old French quarter of New Orleans. At either end of the road he would admire the huge iron warehouses, wharves and wharf-taps. The New Orleans, Mobile and Texas Railroad, running along the Gulf Coast, has done much for the commerce of the To a stranger, entering Louisiana from Texas in the month of April or May, when the land is in the fullness of all its delights, and traveling from Brashear to New Orleans, the journey is as delicious as novel. His eyes would have last rested upon the low white-sanded shores of Galveston, which the blue waves in the roadstead and along the beach seemed always hastening to overwhelm and bury out of sight; and the change to the weird, fantastic foliage and quaint lands of Louisiana would be startling. Dashing away toward the great city, he would pass long stretches of giant cypress forests, from the boughs of whose trees thousands of Spanish moss-beards were pendent. Long and somber aisles, like those in some giant cathedral, would open to right and left beside him. He would wonder at the presence of the bearded moss on all the trees, and his commercial eye would, perhaps, suggest that it be made available for upholstery; but he would be told that the quaint parasite is the scavenger of the air; that, as an air-plant extending over a vast surface, presenting an immense area for the absorp-metropolis, and is undoubtedly one of the tion of carbonic acid gas, and evolving oxygen in corresponding quantities, it opcrates as a complete regulator of atmospheric conditions. What would the Louisianian do without it in such a tropical climate? It absorbs the sea moisture, and does a beneficent work throughout all the alluvial region. But some day the commercial will predominate over the hygienic view, and the graceful moss-beards will be macerated, strained, dyed, and prepared for stuffing for cushions, pillows, mattresses and car-seats. The traveler would now and then be whirled out of these forests and their adjacent canebrakes, with long alleyways running through them, into the broad sugar lands, and would pause on the bank of some picturesque bayou, at a little station whose nomenclature was unmistakably French, and whose platform was crowded with negroes chattering in Gallic patois or in broadest American. He would be hurried forward, faster than his will, through the rich Boeuf country, along the banks of whose lovely bayou lie wonderful sugar lands, once crowded with prosperous planters, but now showing many | best built lines in the country. It drains portions of Mississippi and Alabama toward the Crescent City, and gives the latter increased prosperity at the expense of Mobile. It also opens to easy access for the summer-weary citizens of the towns along the Mississippi river, the charms of Bay St. Louis and Ocean Springs, delightful gulf-side retreats, much affected by Southerners in the hot months. At Biloxi, near the site of the old fort at which Sauvolle died, and which Bienville left to found New Orleans, and at Bay St. Louis, the views outward upon the gulf are exceedingly fine, and all the surroundings of the little towns are exquisite. There is all the dreaminess and mysterious languor of Biarritz or San Sebastian, mingled with the inspiring forestbreaths of Arcachon, in these beautiful retreats. The New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad gives a valuable connection with the North via Jackson, Miss., and helps to drain the Mississippi Valley towards the capital city. The most important needs of Louisiana at the present time are railway communication with |