The extracts which follow furnish another illustration of the horrors produced by passions blown up to fury in the furnace of arbitrary power. We have just been looking over a broken file of Louisiana papers, including the last six months of 1837, and the whole of 1838, and find ourselves obliged to abandon our design of publishing even an abstract of the scores and hundreds of affrays, murders, assassinations, duels, lynchings, assaults, &c. which took place in that state during that period. Those which have taken place in New Orleans alone, during the last eighteen months, would, in detail, fill a volume. Instead of inserting the details of the principal atrocities in Louisiana, as in the states already noticed, we will furnish the reader with the testimony of various editors of newspapers, and others, residents of the state, which will perhaps as truly set forth the actual state of society there, as could be done by a publication of the outrages themselves.
From the "New Orleans Bee," of May 23, 1838.
"Contempt of human life.—In view of the crimes which are daily committed, we are led to inquire whether it is owing to the inefficiency of our laws, or to the manner in which those laws are administered, that this frightful deluge of human blood flows through our streets and our places of public resort.
"Whither will such contempt for the life of man lead us? The unhealthiness of the climate mows down annually a part of our population; the murderous steel despatches its proportion; and if crime increases as it has, the latter will soon become the most powerful agent in destroying life.
"We cannot but doubt the perfection of our criminal code, when we see that almost every criminal eludes the law, either by boldly avowing the crime, or by the tardiness with which legal prosecutions are carried on, or, lastly, by the convenient application of bail in criminal cases."
The "New Orleans Picayune" of July 30, 1837, says:
"It is with the most painful feelings that we daily hear of some fatal duel. Yesterday we were told of the unhappy end of one of our most influential and highly respectable merchants, who fell yesterday morning at sunrise in a duel. As usual, the circumstances which led to the meeting were trivial."
The New Orleans correspondent of the New York Express, in his letter dated New Orleans, July 30, 1837, says:
"THIRTEEN DUELS have been fought in and near the city during the week; five more were to take place this morning."
The "New Orleans Merchant" of March 20, 1838, says:
"Murder has been rife within the two or three weeks last past; and what is worse, the authorities of those places where they occur are perfectly regardless of the fact."
The "New Orleans Bee" of September 8, 1838, says: