I mention as another objection, the dangerous influence to which children are more or less exposed on a _long voyage at sea_. From some of the missionary fields, the voyage must be five, six, or seven months. I speak not of what are called the dangers of the deep, or the hardships of a sea life for six or seven months. These are of little account. The danger of which I speak is, the pernicious influence to which for that length of time they are exposed. This is an objection which, though not of sufficient weight in itself to determine one's course, may yet come in as an item in making up the account. On the supposition that children are sent, they go of course without their parents. In some cases the protector to whom they are to be intrusted may not be altogether such as could be desired. Even in case a parent accompanies the children, he will find it a great task to keep them from many pernicious influences during a long voyage. In very many ships they will hear more or less profane, low, vulgar and infamous language, both in conversation and in song. They will see exhibitions of anger, impatience, fretfulness, boisterous laughter and giddy mirth. They will see the holy Sabbath made a day of business, or at best a day of lounging and idleness. They will be likely on the one hand to receive such caresses as to make them vain and self-important; or, on the other hand, to be so treated as to chafe their tempers and injure their dispositions. In short, for six or seven months, they must be thrown into a strange family; into a family confined to the narrow limits of a ship's cabin and deck; into a family over which the parent of the children has no control; into a family, too, composed of the variety of character and disposition of those who sail on the ocean. Thus circumstanced, children inevitably suffer much, even under the vigilant eye of a parent, and still more would they suffer under any eye less careful and attentive. This moral danger to which children are exposed at sea, though not an objection of the strongest kind, is yet an item worthy of being noticed. Missionaries think of it when sending away their children, and dread it far more than tempests and tornadoes.