sometimes break tether and run riot on his
canvas? Because the orator may provoke the wild passions of the mob,
shall there be no more public speaking?--no further acting because the
actor may be pleased to saw the air, or the actress display her ultimate
inch of leg? Shall we upset the pulpit because poor dear Mr. Tilton had
a prettier wife than poor, dear Mr. Beecher? The bench had its Jeffrey,
yet it is necessary that we have the deliveries of judgment between
ourselves and the litigious. The medical profession has nursed poisoners
enough to have baned all the rats of christendom; but the resolute
patient must still have his prescription--if he die for it. Shall we
disband our armies because in the hand of an ambitious madman a
field-marshal's baton may brain a helpless State?--our navies because in
ships pirates have "sailed the seas over?" Let us not commit the
vulgarity of condemning the dance because of its possibilities of
perversion by the vicious and the profligate. Let us not utter us in hot
bosh and baking nonsense, but cleave to reason and the sweet sense of
things.

Dancing never made a good girl bad, nor turned a wholesome young man to
evil ways. "Opportunity!" simpers the tedious virgin past the
wall-flower of her youth. "Opportunity!" cackles the _blase_ beau who
has outlasted his legs and gone deaconing in a church.

Opportunity, indeed! There is opportunity in church and school-room, in
social intercourse. There is opportunity in libraries, art-galleries,
picnics, street-cars, Bible-classes and at fairs and matinees.
Opportunity--rare, delicious opportunity, not innocently to be
ignored--in moonlight rambles by still streams. Opportunity, such as it
is, behind the old gentleman's turned back, and beneath the good
mother's spectacled nose. You shall sooner draw out leviathan with a
hook, or bind Arcturus and his sons, than baffle the upthrust of
Opportunity's many heads. Opportunity is a veritable Hydra, Argus and
Briareus rolled into one. He has a hundred heads to plan his poachings,
a hundred eyes to spy the land, a hundred hands to set his snares and
springes. In the country where young girls are habitually unattended in
the street; where the function of chaperon is commonly, and, it should
be added, intelligently performed by some capable young male; where the
young women receive evening calls from young men concerning whose
presence in the parlor mamma in the nursery and papa at the
"office"--p