=Girls lose confidence in mother.=--While on a seven thousand-mile lecture trip, in company with twenty other lecturers, conducting purity conventions in many of the large cities in the United States and Canada, after the evening sessions were over, in company with one or two detectives and other parties of our crowd, we visited the “red light” districts and saw several thousand erring girls from twelve to twenty years old. Those girls were once as innocent, pure and sweet as yours or mine. They first went to their mothers and asked about the origin of their lives. Those were golden opportunities for safeguarding the virtue of those girls. More easily than at any other time in life could those girls have been impressed with the sacredness of sex. At no other time in life is it so true that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Much more of Christian effort is put forth to rescue the fallen than to prevent the youths from falling. More churches are open to lectures on rescue work than on preventive work. More money can be raised for rescue work than can be raised to prevent youths from falling. =Boys and girls want to know the real truth.=--One morning a number of high school boys requested that I give them a lecture more advanced than the one I had given. While passing through the hall, at the close of this special lecture to the young men, I was approached by the lady principal with the request from the high school girls for a special lecture. She told me that fourteen had made the request and that several added: “We wish that Prof. Shannon was a lady lecturer. There are so many things we would like to know, but would hesitate to ask a gentleman lecturer.” Then the lady teacher added, “I said, girls, why do you not ask your mamma for such information?” With hands uplifted, a look of surprise, a gasp for breath, those girls replied: “I would not think of asking mamma such questions.” Why not? Let me tell you why. When they were little innocent girls they went to their mothers with their first questions of sex. They were treated as already indicated. Their inquiring minds and unsatisfied interests in the mysteries of life led them to go elsewhere for this information. It was at this point in their lives that a chasm started to form between themselves and their mothers. There is not one boy in twenty-five who will go voluntarily to his father for information or advice about his sex-nature. The same statement is almost as true about girls and their mothers.