agrant make an honest, hardworking Western pioneer.
It is true that sometimes the habit of vagrancy and idling may be too
deeply worked in him for his character to speedily reform; but, if of
tender years, a change of circumstances will nearly always bring a
change of character.

With a girl-vagrant it is different. She feels homelessness and
friendlessness more; she has more of the feminine dependence on
affection; the street-trades, too, are harder for her, and the return at
night to some lonely cellar or tenement-room, crowded with dirty people
of all ages and sexes, is more dreary. She develops body and mind
earlier than the boy, and the habits of vagabondism stamped on her in
childhood are more difficult to wear off.

Then the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice comes in. It has
often seemed to me one of the most dark arrangements of this singular
world that a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on
its immortal career with almost every influence about it degrading, its
inherited tendencies overwhelming toward indulgence of passion, its
examples all of crime or lust, its lower nature awake long before its
higher, and then that it should be allowed to soil and degrade its soul
before the maturity of reason, and beyond all human possibility of
cleansing!

For there is no reality in the sentimental assertion that the sexual
sins of the lad are as degrading as those of the girl. The instinct of
the female is more toward the preservation of purity, and therefore her
fall is deeper--an instinct grounded in the desire of preserving a
stock, or even the necessity of perpetuating our race.

Still, were the indulgences of the two sexes of a similar character--as
in savage races--were they both following passion alone, the moral
effect would not perhaps be so different in the two cases. But the sin
of the girl soon becomes what the Bible calls "a sin against one's own
body," the most debasing of all sins. She soon learns to offer for sale
that which is in its nature beyond all price, and to feign the most
sacred affections, and barter with the most delicate instincts. She no
longer merely follows blindly and excessively an instinct; she perverts
a passion and sells herself. The only parallel case with the male sex
would be that in some Eastern communities which are rotting and falling
to pieces from their debasing and unnatural crimes. When we hear of such
disgusting offenses under any form of c