milies; they are always on hand at social
gatherings of every sort. They haunt the ball-room, the theater, and
the church, when they can forward their infamous plans by seeming to
be pious. Not infrequently they are well supplied with a stock of pious
cant, which they employ on occasion to make an impression. They are
the sharks of society, and often seize in their voracious maws the
fairest and brightest ornaments of a community. The male flirt is a
monster. Every man ought to despise him; and every woman ought to spurn
him as a loathsome social leper.

Youthful Flirtations.--Flirting is not confined to young men and women.
The contagion extends to little boys and girls, whose heads ought to
be as empty of all thoughts of sexual relations as the vacuum of an
air-pump of air. The intimate association of young boys and girls in
our common schools, and, indeed, in the majority of educational
institutions, gives abundant opportunity for the fostering of this kind
of a spirit, so prejudicial to healthful mental and moral development.
Every educator who is alive to the objects and interests of his
profession knows too well the baneful influence of these premature and
pernicious tendencies. Many times has the teacher watched with a sad
heart the withering of all his hopes for the intellectual progress of
a naturally gifted scholar by this blighting influence. The most
dangerous period for boys and girls exposed to temptations of this sort
is that just following puberty, or between the ages of twelve and
eighteen or twenty. This period, a prominent educator in one of our
Western States once denominated, not inappropriately, "the agonizing
period of human puppyhood." If this critical period is once safely
passed, the individual is comparatively safe; but how many fail to pass
through the ordeal unseared!

The most painful phase of this subject is the tacit--even, in many cases,
active--encouragement which too many parents give their children in
this very direction, seemingly in utter ignorance of the enormity of
the evil which they are winking at or fostering. Parents need
enlightenment on this subject, and need to be aroused to the fact that
it is one of the most momentous questions that can arise in the rearing
and training of children.

Polygamy.--One hundred years ago the discussion of the public propriety
or impropriety of a plurality of wives would have been impossible.
Polygamy had not obtained a foothold as an instit