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-rooms and theatres and in many other places, the same hideous abuse, which must be nameless here, flourishes unchecked: A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is often haunted from pillar to post by her employer, and if he fails to get her to submit to his diabolical solicitations outside of the ball room, he will manage to get her to attend a dancing school, where he has the _right_ to encircle her with his arms and press her to himself until she is inflamed with passion. She hears in the ball room no warning voice, finds no helping hand to guide her in the path of virtue. The only helping hands there are those of which Byron wrote, "Hands which may freely range in public sight Were ne'er before--" and which helps her rapidly down the road to ruin. When the poor girl is once induced to sacrifice her virtue she is treated as a slave and outcast by the very man who brought her ruin upon her. Her self-respect is gone. Her life becomes valueless to her, and she is swept downward, ever downward, into the bottomless pit of prostitution, and becomes an outcast from her fellow-beings. But she is far nearer the loving, pitying heart of Christ than all the men who forced her down. And who shall say that Jesus loves her less than He does those who profess to be His followers and the soldiers of His cross, and yet stand silently and idly by while all this fearful wrong goes on.