1. Public Balls.—The church should turn its face like flint against the public ball. Its influence is evil, and nothing but evil. It is a well known fact that in all cities and large towns the ball room is the recruiting office for prostitution.
2. Thoughtless Young Women.—In cities public are given every night, and many thoughtless young women,mostly the daughters of small tradesmen and mechanics, or clerks or laborers, are induced to attend "just for fun." Scarcely one in a hundred of the girls attending these balls preserve their purity. They meet the most desperate characters, professional gamblers, criminals and the lowest debauchees. Such an assembly and such influence cannot mean anything but ruin for an innocent girl.
3. Vile Women.—The public ball is always a resort of vile women who picture to innocent girls the ease and luxury of a harlot's life, and offer them all manner of temptations to abandon the paths of virtue. The public ball is the resort of the libertine and the adulterer, and whose object is to work the ruin of every innocent girl that may fall into their clutches.
4. The Question.—Why does society wonder at the increase of prostitution, when the public balls and promiscuous dancing is so largely endorsed and encouraged?
5. Working Girls.—Thousands of innocent working girls enter innocently and unsuspectingly into the paths which lead them to the house of evil, or who wander the streets as miserable outcasts all through the influence of the dance. The low theatre and dance halls and other places of unselected gatherings are the milestones which mark the working girl's downward path from virtue to vice, from modesty to shame.
6. The Saleswoman, the seamstress, the factory girl or any other virtuous girl had better, far better, die than take the first step in the path of impropriety and danger. Better, a thousand times better, better for this life, better for the life to come, an existence of humble, virtuous industry than a single departure from virtue, even though it were paid with a fortune.
7. Temptations.—There is not a young girl but what is more or less tempted by some unprincipled wretch who may have the reputation of a genteel society man. It behooves parents to guard carefully the morals of their daughters, and be vigilant and cautious in permitting them to accept the society of young men. Parents who desire to save their daughters from a fate which is worse than death, should endeavor by every means in their power to keep them from falling into traps cunningly devised by some cunning lover. There are many good young men, but not all are safe friends to an innocent, confiding young girl.
8. Prostitution.—Some girls inherit their vicious tendency; others fall because of misplaced affections; many sin through a love of dress, which is fostered by society and by the surroundings amidst which they may be placed; many, very many, embrace a life of shame to escape poverty While each of these different phases of prostitution require a different remedy, we need better men, better women, better laws and better protection for the young girls.