of cultivation, and new modes of making sugar; pushing improvements, stimulating enterprise, and encouraging a community of feeling, as they held a common interest in the country.  In the country parishes these prejudices of race had never been so strong as in the city, and were fast giving way; intermarriages and family relations were beginning to identify the people, and this to some extent was true in the city.  But here there was a conflict of interest, and this seemed on the increase.  The improvements made in the Faubourg were suggested by the necessities of commerce, and this naturally went to these.  There was a superior enterprise in the American merchant, there was greater liberality in his dealings:  he granted hazardous accommodations to trade, and made greater efforts to secure it.  This had the effect of securing the rapidly increasing commerce of the city to the American merchants, and of course was promoting the settlement and improvement of the Faubourg St. Mary.  It excited, too, more and more the antipathies of the ancient population.  These, controlling the city government constantly in a most envious spirit, refused to extend the public improvements of the Faubourg.

There was not, forty years ago, or in 1828, a paving-stone above Canal Street, nor could any necessity induce the government of the city to pave a single street.  Where now stands the great St. Charles Hotel, there was an unsightly and disgusting pond of fetid water, and the locations now occupied by the City Hotel and the St. James were cattle-pens.  There was not a wharf in the entire length of the city, and the consequence was an enormous tax levied upon produce, in the shape of drayage and repairs of injuries to packages, from the want of these prime necessities.

The navigation of the Bayou St. John commanded for the lower portion of the city the commerce crossing the lake, and to monopolize the profits of travel, a railroad was proposed from the lake to the river, and speedily completed.  The people of the Faubourg, to counteract as much as possible these advantages, constructed a canal from the city to the lake, which was to enter the city, or Faubourg St. Mary, at the foot of Julia Street, one of the broadest and best streets in that quarter of the city.  This was of sufficient capacity for schooners and steamboats of two hundred tons burden.  When this was completed, with great difficulty the authorities were prevailed upon to pave Julia Street; still the greatly increasing demands of commerce were neglected, and while by these refusals the population of the city proper was doing all it could to force down to the city this increasing trade, they neglected to do anything there for its accommodation.  The streets were very narrow; the warehouses small and inconvenient; the merchants close and unenterprising, seemingly unconscious of the great revolution going on in their midst.