-rooms and theatres and
in many other places, the same hideous abuse, which must be nameless
here, flourishes unchecked:

A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is often haunted from pillar
to post by her employer, and if he fails to get her to submit to his
diabolical solicitations outside of the ball room, he will manage to get
her to attend a dancing school, where he has the _right_ to encircle her
with his arms and press her to himself until she is inflamed with
passion. She hears in the ball room no warning voice, finds no helping
hand to guide her in the path of virtue. The only helping hands there
are those of which Byron wrote,

"Hands which may freely range in public sight
Were ne'er before--"

and which helps her rapidly down the road to ruin.

When the poor girl is once induced to sacrifice her virtue she is
treated as a slave and outcast by the very man who brought her ruin upon
her. Her self-respect is gone. Her life becomes valueless to her, and
she is swept downward, ever downward, into the bottomless pit of
prostitution, and becomes an outcast from her fellow-beings.

But she is far nearer the loving, pitying heart of Christ than all the
men who forced her down. And who shall say that Jesus loves her less
than He does those who profess to be His followers and the soldiers of
His cross, and yet stand silently and idly by while all this fearful
wrong goes on.

The matron of a home for fallen women in Los Angeles, says:
"Seven-tenths of the girls received here have fallen through dancing and
its influence."

Of course, some of these, either from inherited passion or evil
education, have deliberately and of free choice entered upon a life of
shame; but the great majority do so under the stress of temptation;
sometimes because of poverty or chafing against uncongenial employment,
with meager wages. They are told that in the profession of prostitution,
they can, if they are lucky, make more in a single night than they could
by sewing a week.

Can you wonder that many a girl, aroused by the waltz and then lured by
such glittering bait, is led to sell herself, soul and body, to those
who make use of her and then cast her aside for another?

And yet ball-rooms, where this corruption germinates, flourish and are
countenanced by many preachers of the gospel, and attended and
encouraged by church members whose pastors have not the moral courage to
condemn the evil, for fear of offending some of t