means: he uses any and all within his power, secures
success, and this is called enterprise combined with energy. Moral
considerations are a slight obstacle. They may cause him to hesitate,
but never restrain his action. The maxim is ever present to his mind:
it is honorable and respectable to succeed--dishonorable and
disreputable to fail; it is only folly to yield a bold enterprise to
nice considerations of moral right. If he can avoid the penalties of
the civil law, success obviates those of the moral law. Success is the
balm for every wrong--the passport to every honor.

"His race may be a line of thieves,
His acts may strike the soul with horror;
Yet infamy no soiling leaves--
The rogue to-day's the prince to-morrow."

This demoralizes: the expedient for the just--that which will do, not
that which should do, if success requires, must be resorted to. This
idea, like the pestilence which rides the breeze, reaches every heart,
and man's actions are governed only by the law--not by a high moral
sense of right. Providence, it is supposed, prepares for all exigencies
in the operations of nature. If this be true, it may be that the
peculiarities of blood, and the consequence to human character, may, in
the Anglo-American, be specially designed for his mission on this
continent; for assuredly he is the eminently successful man in all
enterprises which are essential in subduing the earth, and aiding in
the spreading of his race over this continent. Every opposition to his
progress fails, and the enemies of this progress fall before him, and
success is the result of his every effort. That the French Creoles
retain the chivalry and noble principles of their ancestry is certainly
true; but that they have failed to preserve the persevering enterprise
of their ancestors is equally true.

Emigration from France, to any considerable extent, was stayed after
the cessation of Louisiana to the United States, and the French
settlements ceased to expand. The country along and north of Red River,
on the Upper Mississippi and the Washita, was rapidly filled up with a
bold, hardy American population, between whom and the French sparsely
peopling the country about Natchitoches on the Red, and Monroe on the
Washita River, there was little or no sympathy; and the consequence was
that many of those domiciled already in these sections left, and
returned to the Lower Mississippi, or went back to France.

There had been, anter