soul of New Orleans came out annually in her Mardi Gras—the exuberant flowering of a spirit perennially young and riante.
And yet to New Orleans came the sobering days of the war, as to all the rest of America. The conscription fell upon her as upon every other city in America; and she also was asked to open her purse for the furtherance of the war and its purposes. How she responded need not be asked, and need not really be recorded, for New Orleans has always maintained beneath her laughing exterior as stern a sense of duty as may be found anywhere in all the world. To be French is to smile—but to be firm. Indeed, New Orleans showed one of the strange phenomena of American life which is not always known in the North—the truth that the South is more Puritan than ever New England was. Texas, supposed to be a bad border state, to-day has stronger laws regarding vice and liquor than New England ever has had since the time of the Blue Laws, and more strictly enforced. Louisiana also, gentle and kindly, has a stiffer code of morals than any commonwealth of the stern and rockbound coast. She smiles—but stands firm.
These reflections become the more obvious as one reads the main story of the activities of A. P. L. in New Orleans. The division does not pride itself ever so much upon its promptness with Liberty Loans, its activity in slacker drives, its firmness as to sabotage and propaganda, as it does upon other phases of work which at first were incidental to the prosecution of the Government war activities. The great boast of the New Orleans division is that it has kept young soldiers away from bad women, and kept women, once evil, away from themselves and gave them a chance to reform and to live a different life. So, therefore, one who shall study all the manifold activities of the American Protective League in this country will see that it had many ways in which it rendered service to the people. Perhaps, long after the League shall have been dissolved, in part forgotten, the New Orleans rehabilitation home, ten miles out from the city, will remain as a monument to the activities of that singular organization which, like King Rex himself, ruler of the Carnival, came
