The growth of habits of licentiousness amongst us exerts the most direct and injurious influence on the lives of virtuous young women of the middle and upper classes of society. The mode of this influence demands very serious consideration on the part of parents. It is natural that young women should wish to please. They possess the true instinct which would guide them to their noble position in society, as the centres of pure and happy homes. How do our social customs meet this want? All the young women of the middle and upper classes of society, no matter how pure and innocent their natures, are brought by these customs of society into direct competition with prostitutes! The modest grace of pure young womanhood, its simple, refined tastes, its love of home pleasures, its instinctive admiration of true and noble sentiments and actions, although refreshing as a contrast, will not compare for a moment with the force of attraction which sensual indulgence and the excitement of debauch exert upon the youth who is habituated to such intoxications. The virtuous girl exercises a certain amount of attraction for a passing moment, but the intense craving awakened in the youth for something far more exciting than she can offer, leads him ever farther from her, in the direction where this morbid craving can be freely indulged. This result is inevitable if licentiousness is to be accepted as a necessary part of society. Physical passion is not in itself evil; on the contrary, it is an essential part of our nature. It is an endowment which, like every other _human_ faculty, has the power of high growth. It possesses that distinctive human characteristic--receptivity to mental impressions. These impressions blend so completely with itself as to change its whole character and effect, and it thus becomes an ennobling or a degrading agent in our lives. In either case, for good or for evil, sex takes a first place as a motive power in human education. The young man inexperienced in life and necessarily crude in thought, but fallen into vice, is mastered by this downward force, and the good girl loses more and more her power over the strong natural attraction of sex which would otherwise draw him to her. The influence which corrupt young men, on the other hand, exercise upon the young women of their own standing in society, is both strong and often injurious. It being natural that young women should seek to attract and retain them, they unconsciously endeavour to adapt themselves to their taste. These tastes are formed by uneducated girls and by society of which the respectable young woman feels the effects, and of which she has a vague suspicion, although, happily, she cannot measure the depth of the evil. The tastes and desires of her young male acquaintance, moulded by coarse material enjoyments, act directly upon the respectable girl, who gives herself up with natural impulse to the influence of her male companion. We