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 CHAPTER XIV

THE STORY OF NEW ORLEANS

The A. P. L. in the Sunny South—Strong Division of the Crescent City—How the League was Organized—Rapid Growth and Wide Activities—Curbing of Vice—Cleaning Up a City.

There is not in all the United States a more lovable city than that founded by Iberville, in an earlier century, above the Delta of the Mississippi. At first French, then part Spanish, part American, all Southern and yet all cosmopolitan, New Orleans has what we may call a personality not approached by any other community on this continent. Up to the time when, a decade or so ago, the once self-contented South began to reach out for a commercial future, so-called, New Orleans was the true Mecca on this continent of the Northern tourists. No need to go to Europe if one wanted different scenes. Here existed always the glamour of old-world customs, an atmosphere as foreign as it was wholly delightful. As the home of easy living and good cooking, as the place of kindly climate and gentle manners, all flavored with a wholesome carelessness as to life and its problems, New Orleans was, to use a very trite expression, in a class quite by herself. She never has had a rival, and more is the pity that the old New Orleans has succumbed to the modern tendency towards utilization and change which has marked all America.

Of such a community it might be expected that none too rigid a view of life and law would obtain. This would not be true of the better elements of New Orleans, yet it was in part true of all the life along the old Gulf Coast, where Lafitte and all his roisterers once lived, and where all the gentleness and ease of nature tended toward what we might call loose living—or at least joie de vivre. The