various leaders of negro society; heads of lodges and fraternal organizations, wearing high silk hats; heads of negro unions wearing badges and colored ribbons. A group of marching men followed the carriages -some in costume, some dressed in their best, some in overalls, but all highly pleased with the Zulu King and his crew.

Slowly the procession made its way down Rampart Street, and from every store, lunch-counter, billiard-hall and saloon, a crowd

came out to see.

Negro women in the crowd called out invitations to the King, shaking their hips and rolling their eyes, and to these love-cries he responded with answers more amorous than delicate, while black girls exclaimed loudly to each other and to any one else who cared to listen, "Oh, ain't he some man!"

The parade progressed at a snail's pace, owing partly to the crowds in the street and partly to the eccentricities of the drivers of the mules, who stopped here and there to chat with acquaintances along the way. At these stopping points the King rose from his chair, went to the edge of the wagon, bent down and exchanged a resounding smack with some dusky belle who came close, holding up her lips. And after each of these salutes, the King would turn about and yell back to the old woman who was frying fish, "Give dis gal a mouf'ful uv fish, sistah!" To which the old woman would reply, "Sho' will!" And the damsel

would stand open-mouthed until the morsel of hot catfish was given her. At these signs of royal favor the cheers rose afresh. "Great day!" "Look at dat!" "Gawd knows!" "Well now, people!"

"Annie done tempt de King!"

But once the monarch suffered a slight accident as he bent down to exchange a smack with a black girl. One of the dark-skinned outriders was directly behind the royal car, and as the King bent forward the hungry mule took a mouthful of his grass skirt. There was a tug, a shout, and the King turned to find the entire back of his skirt gone, while only a few wisps of straw were seen hanging from the mule's mouth.

The crowd burst into a roar of Rabelaisian mirth, and the King planted a well-aimed kick at the mule's head. Then, with more haste than dignity, he seated himself again upon his throne. And the parade moved on.

Robert had pushed up his devilmask and was rocking with laughter. We stood there in the street as the crowd of negroes swept past us, and I listened to the blaring jangle of the band as it grew faint in the distance.

"Us got tuh hurry back tuh Canal Street," said Robert as he readjusted his mask, and continuing his explanation in muffled tone, "It's time foh de white folks' King to be comin'ah mean Rex, de big king. He's got charge of all his heah Mardi Gras business."

F

OR a dozen years the leaders

of the legal profession, social workers and laymen on the streets have looked with justified alarm on the spectacle of single American cities indulging in more crime a year than all the people of Great Britain-the menace of acknowledged and chronic lawlessness. Crime commissions sit, and clean-up campaigns come and go. But every great American city remains a dangerous place by day and by night. Murders, hold-ups, homicides: in gambling districts, in silk-stocking areas, on the grounds of great universities, in the shadow of cathedrals. What is the cause? Is there no remedy?

It is a later stage of a great historical process. And history ought to be our teacher. Our earliest ancestors fled from a world of restraint and subordination. They found themselves in the midst of a vast wilderness where lands were to be had for the taking, and where social restraint slowly relaxed. To avoid wars with the red men, the English government forbade the private seizure of home sites. The colonists ignored the law. Then assemblies of the early commonwealths repeated the injunctions of the

mother country. For a hundred and fifty years these injunctions were violated in every settlement. The consequence was a lawless frontier that stretched in 1776 all the way from New Hampshire to northern Georgia, the great Indian tribes beyond the Alleghanies, bitter and unrelenting foes. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Richard Henderson, foremost of American heroes and pioneers, violated or approved the most solemn of decrees against the seizure of Indian lands. It was a great example, a long conflict which merged into the war for independence.

Of hardly less importance in the making of the American mind was the effect of British limitations set upon ocean trade. From the day when tobacco became a valuable commodity, the Southerners craved access to the rich and active Dutch market. England forbade it and set up a hundred rules to outlaw it: a thousand ship-masters and hopeful tobacco-planters violated the law, first and last, and set up the doctrine of free trade for all the world. What the easygoing Virginians did in a quiet way, the stern saints of Massachusetts did with Cromwellian ruthlessness. They sailed the fastest ships upon the

ocean. They took their products to the forbidden West Indies. They disposed of their cargoes for the shining gold and silver of the Spanish world, or loaded into their ships' holds the precious Jamaica rum, hurried to the coast of Africa and brought back bewildered blacks for the growing plantations, and then took sugar to New England where they converted it into more rum which found its way to the frontier farms and the Indian villages, in return for skins and furs. In the hundred years before 1776 they built up one of the great trades of the world and kept the British navy on guard day and night trying to bring the clever lawbreakers to book, trying in vain. And this violation of known and acknowledged law likewise merged into the Revolution of 1776, "free trade all over the world" one of its chief slogans. Other great Americans made their names in this prolonged conflict, Sam Adams, James Otis and John Hancock, names as dear to New-Englanders as those of Franklin and Washington farther south: an abiding influence on the minds of the men who must later become the citizens of the great, free republic.

Free lands and free trade. When the War of Independence was over, the very men who had taken lands for themselves or made fortunes in unlawful trade must lead or govern other men who had accustomed themselves to violate unpopular laws. It was not an easy position. And the war had cost so much that the leaders of 1787 set aside the rich unseized lands for the payment of domestic and international debts. Nor was there any other way to

procure an income but by the laying of heavy taxes upon trade. There was, therefore, neither free lands nor free trade; and now the Indians were guaranteed their hunting-grounds even more firmly by Washington than they had been guaranteed by George III. Frontiersmen everywhere violated the new land laws as they had violated the older ones; the habit was chronic on the western borders.

Nor was it different with the trade on the Atlantic, save only as the British navy intervened. But a little later when the French made all Europe and every sea a scene of war, American tradespeople came again into their own. And for twenty years fortunes piled up in eastern townsan example of abiding influence in the region of steady habits. One needs not to press the point, nor discuss circumstance and justification. The Westerners had their lands for which they did not pay. The Easterners carried their flag, when they did not raise the flags of other nations, into every sea. It was young, ruthless America, flouting the law he made.

thought to make men perfect in a wicked world. When Jefferson found ways to negotiate vast tracts of lands from the natives, he was hailed a great philosopher and statesman; when he laid idealistic reforms upon the Northwest and sought to make black men free, he was a wild dreamer. And so so negroes were carried into Ohio, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as indentured servants; nor were the courts disposed to intervene and enforce the law. Courts are timid in great matters. There were many slaves in Indiana forty years after 1787; and in Illinois there was a great struggle as late as 1823 to determine whether that State might become a slave State like Virginia, the sacred ordinance hardly mentioned. Free men in a free country did not take easily to the ways of law and order. But I must not say the reform of 1787 was wholly without effect. Assisted by climate and the character of the soil the successors of the reformers won their point and made Illinois a free State on a close margin, their victory one of the remote causes of the war between the States.

There was to be another trial of a great law. Thomas Jefferson sought in the anti-slave-trade law of 1807 to forbid forever the importation of blacks from Africa. He reorganized the House of Representatives in December 1806 in the hope of realizing his dream, three fourths of the people clearly with him. After a bitter debate, his proposition was made into law, though the proposed penalties were converted into jokers. Every year after 1807 there were more slaves imported from Africa than the average in the years before.

before.

But powerful men in the minority opposed the law. They violated it in its severer, quite as freely as in its milder form. In a little while cotton became so important that thousands of anti-slavery men moved south to make cotton, buy slaves and flout the law. From fifty to a hundred ships participated in the forbidden trade and put their profits in the banks of New York and New England. The attorneys-general of the United States were themselves slaveholders; and their appointees in the slave States resigned rather than apply the law in their sections. Eight to ten thousand blacks were bootlegged into the South every year and never a man was hanged till Abraham Lincoln hardened his heart in 1862 and a poor devil paid the penalty in New York. The interests of individuals and the rights of States to violate Federal law were stronger than the will of the majority.

In the anger and rivalry of 1850 both Northerners and Southerners agreed to the enactment of the famous fugitive-slave law. The bill did not fail of safe majorities. The law was but a plan for the enforcement of a clause of the constitution. Clay and Webster, Douglas and Lincoln declared the law valid and properly enforceable in all the States. But a minority, not unaware that the Southern planters flouted the antislave-trade law, a small minority in the centers of publicity, refused all