ou-penetrated soil, on its rich uplands and its vast prairies, a gigantic struggle is in progress. It is the battle of race with race, of the picturesque and unjust civilization of the past with the prosaic and leveling civilization of the present. For a century and a half it was coveted by all nations; overrun by the great dominant European powers the French, the English, the Spaniards. It has been in turn the plaything of monarchs and the bait of adventurers. Its history and tradition are leagued with all that was romantic in the eighteenth century. From its immense limits outsprang the noble sisterhood of south-western States, whose inexhaustible domain affords ample refuge for the poor of all the world. A little more than half a century ago the frontier of Louisiana, with the Spanish internal provinces, extended nineteen hundred miles; the territory boasted a line of sea-coast of five hundred miles on the Pacific Ocean; drew a boundary line seventeen hundred miles along the edge of the British-American dominions; thence followed the Mississippi by a comparative course for fourteen hundred miles; fronted the Mexican Gulf for seven hundred miles, and embraced within its territory nearly a million and a half square miles. Texas was a fragment broken from it. California, Kansas, and the Indian Territory, Missouri and Mississippi, were made from it, and still there was an Empire to spare, watered by five of the finest rivers of the world. Indiana, Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska were born out of it. Europe, in John Law's time, went Louisiana-mad. From French Bienville to American Claiborne the administrations were dramatic, diplomatic, bathed in the atmosphere of conspiracy. Superstition cast a weird veil of mystery over the great rivers, and Indian legend peopled every nook and cranny of the Territory with fantastic creations of untutored fancy. The humble roof of the log cabin on the banks of the Mississippi covered all the grace and elegance of the French society of the Great Monarch's time. Jesuit and Cavalier carried European thought to the Indians. Frenchman and Spaniard, Canadian and Yankee, intrigued and planned on Louisianian soil with an energy and fierceness displayed nowhere else in our early history. What wonder, after this cosmopolitan record, that even the fragment of Louisiana which has retained the name-this remnant THE CATHEDRAL ST. LOUIS-NEW ORLEANS. embracing but a thirtieth of the area of the original Territory,-yet still covering more than thirty millions of acres of upland prairie, alluvial and sea marsh,-what wonder that it is so richly varied, so charming, so unique? Six o'clock, on Saturday evening, in the good old city of New Orleans. From the tower of the Cathedral St. Louis the tremulous harmony of bells drifts lightly on the cool spring breeze, and hovers like a benediction over the antique buildings, the blossoms and hedges in the square, and the broad and swiftly-flowing river. The bells are calling all in the parish to offer masses for the repose of the soul of the Cathedral's founder, Don Andre Almonaster, once upon a time "perpetual regidor" of New Orleans. Every Saturday eve for three-quarters of a century, the solemn music from the Cathedral belfry has brought the good Andre to mind; and the mellow notes, as we hear them, seem to call up visions of the quaint past. Don Andre gave the Cathedral its dower in 1789, while the colony was under the domination of Charles the Fourth of Spain. The original edifice is gone now, and in its stead, since 1850, has stood a composite structure which is a monument to bad taste. Venerable and imposing was the old Cathedral, with its melange of rustic, Tuscan, and Roman Doric orders of architecture, with its towers crowned with low spires, and its semicircular arched door, with clustered Tuscan columns on either side, at the front; and many a grand pageant had it seen. The new church seems like an impertinent parvenu, beside its neighbors. Under the pavement of the Cathedral was buried Father Antonio de Sedella, a Spanish priest, who, in his time, was one of the celebrities of New Orleans, and the very recollection of whom calls up memories of the Inquisition, of intrigue and mystery. Father Antonio's name is sacred in the Louisianian capital, nevertheless; for although an enraged Spanish Governor once expelled him for presuming to establish the Inquisition too sharply in the colony, he came back, and flourished until 1837, under American rule, dying at the age of ninety, in the odor of sanctity, mourned by the women and worshiped by the children. Emperor, fearful lest the cannon of the English fleets might thunder at the gates of New Orleans when he was at war with England, at the beginning of this century, sold the "Earthly Paradise" to the United States. "The English," said the man of destiny, "shall not have the Mississippi, which they covet." And they did not get it. Seventy years ago the tide of crude, hasty American progress rushed in upon these lovely lowlands bordering the river and the Gulf; and it is a wonder that even a few landmarks of French and Spanish rule are left high above the flood. You may compass the perfection of contrast in a brief time here. Yonder is the archbishop's palace: stand upon one side of it, and you seem in a foreign land; stand upon the other, and you catch a glimpse of the rush and hurof American traffic of to-day along the levee; you see the sharp-featured "river hand," hear his uncouth parlance, and recognize him for your countryman; you see huge piles of cotton bales; you hear the monotonous whistle of the gigantic white steamers arriving and departing; and the irrepressible negro slouches sullenly by with his hands in his pockets, and his cheeks distended with tobacco. Now the sunlight mingles with the breeze bewitchingly; the old square,-the gray and red buildings, with massive walls and encircling balconies, the great door of the new Cathedral-all are lighted up. See! a blackrobed woman, with downcast eyes, passes silently over the holy threshold; a blind beg-ry gar, with a parti-colored handkerchief wound about his weather-beaten head, hears the rustling of her gown, and stretches out his trembling hand for alms; the market-women hush their chatter as they near the portal; a mulatto lazzaroni is lounging in the shade of an ancient arch, beneath the old Spanish Council House ;-this is not an American scene, and one almost persuades himself that he is in Europe, although ten minutes of rapid walking will bring him to streets and squares as generically American as any in Boston, Chicago, or St. Louis. The city of New Orleans is fruitful in surprises. In a morning's promenade, which shall not extend over an hundred acres, one may encounter the civilizations of Paris, of Madrid, of Messina; may stumble upon the semi-barbaric life of the negro and the native Indian; may see the overworked American in his business establishment and in his elegant home; and may find, strangest of all, that each and every foreign type moves in a special current of its own, mingling little with the American, which is dominant; in it, yet not of it-as the Gulf Stream in the Ocean. But the older colonial landmarks here in the city, as throughout the State and the Mississippi Valley, are fast disappearing. The imprint of French manners and customs will long remain, however; for it was made lasting by two periods of domination. The hatred of Napoleon the Great for the English was the motive which led to the cession of Louisiana to the United States: had he not come upon the stage of European politics, the Valley of the Father of Waters might have been French to-day; and both sides of Canal street would have reminded the European of Paris and Bordeaux. The French You must know much of the past of New Orleans and Louisiana to thoroughly understand their present. New England sprang from the Puritan mould; Louisiana, from the French and Spanish civilizations of the eighteenth century. The one stands erect, vibrating with life and activity, austere and ambitious, upon its rocky shores; the other lies ALMS. prone, its rich vitality dormant and passive, luxurious and unambitious, on the glorious shores of the tropic Gulf. The former was Anglo-Saxon and simple even to Spartan plainness at its outset; the latter was Franco-Spanish, subtle in the graces of the elder societies, self-indulgent and romantic at its beginning. And New Orleans was no more or less the antipodes of Boston in 1773 than it is in 1873. It was a hardy rose indeed which dared to blush in the New England even of Governor Winthrop's time, before June had dowered its beauty on the land; it was an o'er modest Choctaw rose in the Louisiana of De Soto's time which did not shower its petals on the fragrant turf in February. In Louisiana summer lingers long after the rude winter of the North has done its work of devastation; there the sleeping passion of the climate only breaks now and then into the lightning of anger or the terrible tears of the thunder-storm; there is no chronic March horror of deadly wind or transpiercing cold; the sun is kind, and the days are pearls. Wandering from the ancient Place d'Armes, now dignified with the appellation of "Jackson Square," through the older quarters of the city, one may readily call to mind the curious changeful past of the commonwealth and its cosmopolitan capital; for there is a visible reminder at many a corner, and on many a wall. It requires but little effort of imagina tion to restore the city to our view as it was in 1723, five years after Bienville, the second French Governor of Louisiana, had undertaken the dubious project of establishing a capital on the treacherous Mississippi's bank. Discouraged and faint almost unto death, after the terrible sufferings which he and his fellow-colonists had undergone at Biloxi, a bleak fort in a wilderness, he had dragged his weary limbs to the only spot which seemed to him advantageous on the river-coast, and there defiantly unfurled the flag of France, and made his last stand! Bienville was a man of vast courage and supreme daring; he had been drifting along the Mississippi, through the stretches of wilderness, since 1699; had vanquished Indian and beast of the forest; was skilled in the lore of the backwoodsman, as became the hardy son of a hardier Canadian father. When he succeeded the brave and courageous Sauvolle as Governor of the colony, which had then become indisputably French, he entered upon a period of harrowing and petty vexations. He had to keep faithful and persistent watch at the entrance of the river from the Gulf; for during many years England, France, and Spain were at war, and the Spaniards ever kept a jealous eye on French progress in America. The colony languished, and was inhabited by only a few vagabond Canadians, some dubious characters from France, and the Government officers. On the 14th of September, 1712, Louis the Magnificent granted to Anthony Crozat, a merchant prince, the Rothschild of the day, the exclusive privilege, for fifteen years, of trading in all the territory which was so indefinitely bounded and claimed by France as Louisiana. Crozat obtained with his charter the additional privilege of sending a ship once a year for negroes to Africa, and of owning and working all the mines to be discovered in the colony, provided that onefourth of their proceeds should be reserved for the king. One ship-load of slaves to every two ship-loads of independent colonists: such were the proportions established for emigration to Louisiana more than a century and a half ago. Slavery was well begun. In 1713 Bienville was displaced to make room for Cadillac, sent from France as Governor; a rude, quarrelsome man, who saw no good in the new colony, and hated and feared Bienville. But Cadillac's daughter loved the quondam Governor whom her father's arrival had degraded; and to save her from a wasted life, the proud Cadillac offered her in marriage to Bienville. The latter did not reciprocate the maid's affection, and Cadillac, burning with rage, and anxious to avenge himself for this humiliation, sent Bienville with a tiny IN THE ARCHBISHOP'S GARDEN. force on a dangerous expedition among the hostile Indians. He went; he returned successful and unharmed. Cadillac's temper soon caused his downfall, and others, equally unsuccessful, succeeded him. Crozat's schemes failed, and he relinquished the colony. And then? Louisiana the indefinite and unfortunate fell into the clutches of John Law. The regent Duke of Orleans had decided to "foster and preserve the colony," and gave it into the hands of the "Company of the Indies," a commercial oligarchy into which Law had blown the breath of life. The Royal Bank sprang into existence under Law's enchanted wand; the charter of the Mississippi Company was registered at Paris, and the exclusive privilege of trading with Louisiana, during twenty-five years, was granted to that company. France was flooded with rumors that Louisiana was the longsought Eldorado; dupes were made by millions; princes waited in John Law's anterooms in Paris. Then came the revulsion, the overturn of Law. Louisiana was no longer represented as a new Atlantis, but as the very mouth of the pit; and it was only colonized by thieves, murderers, beggars, and gypsies, gathered up by force throughout France and expelled from the kingdom. After the bursting of the Law bubble, Bien ville was once more appointed Governor of Louisiana, and in 1718 he chose the spot where now stands the goodly capital as the site of a city, and left a detachment of infantry there to build barracks. Five years thereafter, when the colony, yearly increasing in strength and numbers, had undergone the Pensacola war and a terrible famine, Bienville's favorite town was named as the capital of the territory, and the seat of government was removed from New Biloxi to New Orleans, as the city was called, in honor of the title of the regent of France. Let us look at the New Orleans of that period, between 1723 and 1730. Imagine a low-lying swamp, overgrown with a dense ragged forest, cut up into a thousand miniature islands by ruts and pools filled with stagnant water. Fancy a small cleared space along the superb river channel, a space often inundated and but badly reclaimed from the circumambient swamp; a space divided into a host of small correct squares, each exactly like its neighbor, and each so ditched within and ditched without, as to render the least wandering after nightfall almost perilous. The ditch which ran along the four sides of every square in the city was filled with a black swamp and refuse composite, which, under the burning sun, sent forth a most deadly odor. Around the city was a huge palisade and a gigantic ditch; tall grasses and reeds grew up to the very doors of the houses, and the hoarse chant of myriads of frogs mingled with the vesper songs of the colonists. Away where the waters of the Mississippi and of Lake Pontchartrain had formed a high ridge of land, was the "Leper's Bluff;" and among the reeds from the city thitherward always lurked a host of criminals. The negro, fresh from the African coast, strode defiantly then along the low shores by the stream; he had not learned the crouching, abject gait which a century of slavery gave him. He was punished if he rebelled; THE SUPREME COURT-NEW ORLEANS. but he kept his dignity. In the humble dwellings which occupied the much-drained squares there were noble manners and graces; all the traditions and each finesse of the time had not been forgotten in the voyage from France; and airy gentlemen and stately dames promenaded in this queer, swamp-surrounded, river-endangered fortress, with Parisian grace and ease. There were few churches, and the colonists gathered about great wooden crosses in the open air for the ceremonials of their religion. There were twice as many negroes as white people in the city. Do mestic animals were so scarce that he who injured or fatally wounded a horse or a cow was punished with death. Ursuline nuns and Jesuit fathers glided about the streets upon their sacred missions. The principal avenues within the fortified enclosure were named after princes of the royal blood, -Maine, Condé, Conti, Toulouse, and Bourbon; Chartres street took its name from that of the son of the regent of Orleans, and an avenue was named in honor of Governor Bienville. Along the river for many miles beyond the city, marquises and other noble representatives of aristocratic French families had established plantations, and lived luxurious lives of self-indulgence, without especially contributing to the wealth of the colony. Jews were banished from the bounds of Louisiana. Sundays and holidays were strictly observed, and negroes found working on Sunday were confiscated. No worship save the Catholic was allowed; white subjects were forbidden to marry or to live in concubinage with slaves, and masters were for or bidden to force their slaves into any marriage against their will; the children of a negro slave-husband and a negro free-wife were all free; if the mother were a slave and the husband free, the children shared the condition of the mother. Slaves were forbidden to gather in crowds, either by day or night, under any pretext, and if found assembled, were punished by the whip, or branded with the mark of the flower-de-luce, executed. The slaves all wore marks or badges, and were forbidden to sell produce of any kind without the written consent of their masters. The protection and security of slaves in old age was well provided for; Christian slaves were permitted burial in consecrated ground. The slave who produced a bruise, or the "shedding of blood in the face," on the person of his master, or any of the family to which he appertained, by striking them, was condemned to death; and the runaway slave, when caught, after the first offence, had his ears cut off, and was branded; after the second, was ham-strung and again branded; after the third, was condemned to death. Slaves who had been set free were still bound to show the profoundest respect to their "former masters, their widows and children," under pain of severe penalties. Slave husbands and wives were not permitted to be seized and sold separately when belonging to the same master; and whenever slaves were appointed by their masters tutors to their children, they "were held and regarded as being thereby set free to all intents and purposes." The Choctaws and Chickasaws, the neighbors to the colonists, were waging destructive war against each other; hurricanes regularly destroyed all the engineering works erected by the French government at the mouths of the Mississippi: and expeditions against the Natchez and the Chickasaws; arrivals of ships from France with loads of troops, provisions, and wives for the colonists; the building of levees along the river front near New Orleans, and the occasional deposition from and renewal in office of Bienville, were the chief events in those crude days of the beginning. I like to stand in these old Louisianian byways, and look back on the progress of French civilization in them, now that it has been displaced by a newer one. I like to remember that New Orleans was named after the regent of France; that the beautiful lake lying between the city and the Gulf was christened after the splendid Pontchartrain, him of the lean and hungry look, and of the "smile of death," him to whom the heart of |