p
this department, so powerful and so difficult to manage, in what are
morally the strongest hands, instead of giving it up to the weakest.

"I think, if the different churches of a city, for example, would rent
a building where there should be a billiard-table, one or two
ninepin-alleys, a reading-room, a garden and grounds for ball playing
or innocent lounging, that they would do more to keep their young
people from the ways of sin than a Sunday-school could. Nay, more: I
would go further. I would have a portion of the building fitted up
with scenery and a stage, for the getting up of tableaux or dramatic
performances, and thus give scope for the exercise of that histrionic
talent of which there is so much lying unemployed in society.

"Young people do not like amusements any better for the wickedness
connected with them. The spectacle of a sweet little child singing
hymns, and repeating prayers, of a pious old Uncle Tom dying for his
religion, has filled theatres night after night, and proved that there
really is no need of indecent or improper plays to draw full houses.

"The things that draw young people to places of amusement are not at
first gross things. Take the most notorious public place in
Paris,--the Jardin Mabille, for instance,--and the things which give
it its first charm are all innocent and artistic. Exquisite beds of
lilies, roses, gillyflowers, lighted with jets of gas so artfully as
to make every flower translucent as a gem; fountains where the
gaslight streams out from behind misty wreaths of falling water and
calla-blossoms; sofas of velvet turf, canopied with fragrant
honeysuckle; dim bowers overarched with lilacs and roses; a
dancing-ground under trees whose branches bend with a fruitage of
many-colored lamps; enchanting music and graceful motion; in all these
there is not only no sin, but they are really beautiful and desirable;
and if they were only used on the side and in the service of virtue
and religion, if they were contrived and kept up by the guardians and
instructors of youth, instead of by those whose interest it is to
demoralize and destroy, young people would have no temptation to stray
into the haunts of vice.

"In Prussia, under the reign of Frederick William II., when one
good, hard-handed man governed the whole country like a strict
schoolmaster, the public amusements for the people were made such
as to present a model for all states. The theatres were strictly
supervised,