n feel that their object is as good as achieved. The
wine soon has a visible effect upon the unaccustomed brain, and the
girls are easily induced to drink more.

The third and fourth acts are only repetitions of the first and second,
and the last and fifth takes place behind the scene. The curtain must
fall between us and the going home scene in two hacks to which the half
intoxicated girls have been conveyed by brutes in human form.

We only know that these girls are now unable to resist, if they were to
try, the deed of shame their male companions are bent upon doing, in
that closed carriage, whose driver has been ordered to go slowly, and we
know what has taken place, as in after days we see these girls no more
in respectable society, although their accomplices still appear as most
elegant and highly respectable gentlemen, alias ball-room Apollos.

This tragedy, my friends, was acted out in real life, and is only a
sample of hundreds and hundreds of cases of which I have had personal
knowledge.

"But," some mothers say, "I know that I can trust my daughter. The waltz
may be the means of leading astray some shallow, low-minded girls, and
may arouse the lower nature of some of those whose lower nature lies
very near the surface, but such girls would go astray anyway. My
daughter is a pure, high-minded girl, and I am sure she is trustworthy."

I am glad she is. Keep her so, my friend, _keep her so_. Do not risk
making her otherwise by placing her under the greatest temptation that
can possibly come to a girl.

If you place her in the dancing academy or ball-room she cannot and will
not remain what you say she now is, and she has but a comparatively
small chance of escaping ruin--comparatively only a small chance, I say.

It is a startling fact, but a fact nevertheless, that _two-thirds of the
girls who are ruined fall through the influence of dancing_. Mark my
words, I know this to be true. Let me give you two reasons why it is so.
In the first place I do not believe that any woman can or does waltz
without being improperly aroused, to a greater or less degree. She may
not, at first, understand her feelings, or recognize as harmful or
sinful those emotions which must come to every woman who has a particle
of warmth in her nature, when in such close connection with the opposite
sex; but she is, though unconsciously, none the less surely sowing seed
which will one day ripen, if not into open sin and shame, into a na