the time we get old we will have had
our way long enough. Then let our children come on and we'll have it
their way. For thirty, forty, or fifty years, we have been drinking
from the cup of life; and we ought not to complain if called to pass
the cup along and let others take a drink.

But, while we have a right to the enjoyments of life, we never will
countenance sinful indulgences. I here set forth a group of what
might be called the dissipations of the ball-room. They swing an awful
scythe of death. Are we to stand idly by, and let the work go on, lest
in the rebuke we tread upon the long trail of some popular vanity? The
whirlpool of the ball-room drags down the life, the beauty, and the
moral worth of the city. In this whirlwind of imported silks goes out
the life of many of our best families. Bodies and souls innumerable
are annually consumed in this conflagration of ribbons.

This style of dissipation is the abettor of pride, the instigator of
jealousy, the sacrificial altar of health, the defiler of the soul,
the avenue of lust, and the curse of the town. The tread of this wild,
intoxicating, heated midnight dance jars all the moral hearthstones of
the city. The physical ruin is evident. What will become of those
who work all day and dance all night? A few years will turn them out
nervous, exhausted imbeciles. Those who have given up their midnights
to spiced wines, and hot suppers, and ride home through winter's cold,
unwrapped from the elements, will at last be recorded suicides.

There is but a short step from the ball-room to the grave-yard. There
are consumptions and fierce neuralgias close on the track. Amid that
glittering maze of ball-room splendors, diseases stand right and left,
and balance and chain. A sepulchral breath floats up amid the perfume,
and the froth of death's lip bubbles up in the champagne.

Many of our brightest homes are being sacrificed. There are families
that have actually quit keeping house, and gone to boarding, that
they may give themselves more exclusively to the higher duties of
the ball-room. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, finding
their highest enjoyment in the dance, bid farewell to books, to quiet
culture, to all the amenities of home. The father will, after a while,
go down into lower dissipations. The son will be tossed about
in society, a nonentity. The daughter will elope with a French
dancing-master. The mother, still trying to stay in the glitter,
and by