Soon after this a levee was built in front of the new town, and the early French authors and novelists took pleasure in visiting it, and even at that date they called it “the famous place.” As in Quebec and Montreal, the early French settlement was almost simultaneous with the bringing out of monks and nuns, and soon a cathedral was conceived and nunneries were built. The French, however, had not the vigorous nature of the English in founding new places, and after nearly half a century of occupation there were hardly three thousand persons in it to transfer to the Spanish who took possession of the place in the midst of a revolution, and had some of the best French citizens shot in order to be a terror to what the Spanish governor, O’Reilly, already suspected to exist in French Louisiana, the spirit of independence, which Spain wanted to extirpate in all her colonies, fearing that they would speedily rise to importance and overwhelm the parent power. Spain had been dismembered by a treaty early in the eighteenth century, and was left with enormous American possessions, and with a very small Spain to handle them. The Spanish cabinet then conceived the policy of preventing the growth of the colonies, so as to keep them down, use them merely for trade, and not let that spirit of municipal independence which makes great fermentations in states commence anywhere. Some of the Spanish governors, however, ordered public buildings to be constructed, and the American residents at New Orleans say that the Spanish sway of about forty years has left better monuments than the French. A Spanish infusion of settlers marks the present population, and the Americans call all the Latin races, no matter whether they come from France and her islands, or Spain and her coasts, by the name of Creoles. A curious feature of New Orleans is the existence of considerable elements there from states as foreign to ourselves as Yucatan.