pastor's discourse, and then going away to spend
the time in dancing, and if questioned, they were able to give the text
of the evening's sermon, and the trusting parents would not dream of
their having been any where but at church.

I only wish that certain parents, who think they are restricting their
children to "parlor dancing at home only," could have been with me the
night of May 30th, 1892, and seen, as I did, their girls, some of them
but twelve or fourteen years of age, dancing in a public saloon, where
so much beer had been spilt on the floor that the women had to hold
their dresses up to keep them from getting soiled and wet as they
danced.

This is usually the result of teaching the child to dance and then
restricting them to home dancing. If they once become fascinated with it
they must and will, by some means, fair or foul, have more of it than
their homes afford.

There are professing Christians who condemn the sale of liquor, advocate
the closing of saloons, and frown on Sunday picnics and other
amusements, who allow their own children to attend so-called select
dancing parties.

In these places are taught the rudiments of an education which may make
them graduates of the saloon or the brothel.

I do not say that it _always_ does, but I do say that it _often_ does.

The safe side is the best side. Keep them from taking the first step to
ruin, and they can never take the last.

Where did the majority of the drunkards take their first drink? Where
did the gambler play his first card? Where did three-fourths of the
women, who are to-day living a life of shame, have a man's arm about
them for the first time?

Let me answer.

The first drink of the drunkard was just a social glass.

The first game of the gambler was just a social game.

And three-fourths of the outcasts had a man's arm about them for the
first time when they were young girls at a social dance.

There are in San Francisco 2,500 abandoned women. Prof. La Floris says:
"I can safely say that three-fourths of these women were led to their
downfall through the influence of dancing."

The lot of a Negress in the equatorial forest is not, perhaps, a very
happy one, but it is not much worse than that of many a pretty orphan
girl in our Christian land.

We talk of the brutalities of the dark, dark ages, and profess to
shudder as we read in books of the shameful practices of those times,
and yet, here beneath our very eyes, in our ball