Formerly, duels were as innumerable here as bales of cotton; they have considerably decreased latterly, one cause of which has been, the State of Louisiana passing a law by which any person engaging in a duel is at once deprived of his vote, and disabled from holding any state employment.  John Bull may profit by this hint.

I was much amused, during my stay at New Orleans, by hearing the remarks of the natives upon the anti-slavery meeting at Stafford House, of which the papers were then full.  If the poor duchess and her lady allies had been fiends, there could scarcely have been more indignation at her “presumptuous interference” and “mock humility.”  Her “sisters, indeed! as if she would not be too proud to stretch out her hand to any one of them,” &c.  Then another would break out with, “I should like to know by what right she presumes to interfere with us and offer advice?  If she wants to do good, she has opportunities enough of exercising her charity in London.  Let any one read The Times, and then visit a plantation here, and say whether the negroes are not happier and better off than one-half of the lower classes in England,” &c.  If every animadversion which the duchess and her colleagues’ kind intentions and inoffensive wording of them called forth in America had been a pebble, and if they had all been gathered together, the monument of old Cheops at Ghizeh would have sunk into insignificance when contrasted with the gigantic mass; in short, no one unacquainted with the sensitiveness of the American character can form a conception of the violent state of indignation which followed the perusal of the proceedings of that small conclave of English lady philanthropists.  Mrs. Jones, Smith, Adams, and Brown might have had their meeting on the same subject without producing much excitement; but when the aristocratic element was introduced, it acted as a spark in a barrel of gunpowder.  As an illustration of the excitement produced, I subjoin an extract from one of their daily papers, under the heading of “Mrs. Stowe in Great Britain:”—­

“The principles of free government developed here, and urging our people on with unexampled rapidity in the career of wealth and greatness, have always been subjects of alarm to monarchs and aristocracies—­of pleasure and hope to the people.  It has, of course, been the object of the former to blacken us in every conceivable way, and to make us detestable in the eyes of the world.  There has been nothing since the revolution so well calculated to advance this end, as the exhibition which Mrs. Stowe is making in England.

“It is because they have a deep and abiding hostility to this country, and to republicanism in general, that the aristocracy, not only of England, but of all Europe, have seized with so much avidity upon Uncle Tom, and have been at so much pains to procure a triumphal march for its author through all the regions she may choose to visit.