The Young Man's Guide

by William A. Alcott

5. EVENING PARTIES.

One prolific source of licentious feeling and action may be found, I think, in evening parties, especially when protracted to a late hour. It has always appeared to me that the injury to health which either directly or indirectly grows out of evening parties, was a sufficient objection to their recurrence, especially when the assembly is crowded, the room greatly heated, or when music and dancing are the accompaniments. Not a few young ladies, who after perspiring freely at the latter exercise, go out into the damp night air, in a thin dress, contract consumption; and both sexes are very much exposed, in this way, to colds, rheumatisms, and fevers.

But the great danger, after all, is to reputation and morals. Think of a group of one hundred young ladies and gentlemen assembling at evening, and under cover of the darkness, joining in conclave, and heating themselves with exercise and refreshments of an exciting nature, such as coffee, tea, wine, &c, and in some parts of our country with diluted distilled spirit; and 'keeping up the steam,' as it is sometimes called, till twelve or one o'clock, and frequently during the greater part of the night. For what kind and degree of vice, do not such scenes prepare those who are concerned in them?

Nothing which is here said is intended to be levelled against dancing, in itself considered; but only against such a use, or rather abuse of it as is made to inflame and feed impure imaginations and bad passions. On the subject of dancing as an amusement, I have already spoken in another part of the work.

I have often wondered why the strange opinion has come to prevail, especially among the industrious yeomanry of the interior of our country, that it is economical to turn night into day, in this manner. Because they cannot very well spare their sons or apprentices in the daytime, as they suppose, they suffer them to go abroad in the evening, and perhaps to be out all night, when it may justly be questioned whether the loss of energy which they sustain does not result in a loss of effort during one or two subsequent days, at least equal to the waste of a whole afternoon. I am fully convinced, on my own part, that he who should give up to his son or hired laborer an afternoon, would actually lose a less amount of labor, taking the week together, than he who should only give up for this purpose the hours which nature intended should be spent in sleep.

But—I repeat it—the moral evil outweighs all other considerations. It needs not an experience of thirty years, nor even of twenty, to convince even a careless observer that no small number of our youth of both sexes, have, through the influence of late evening parties, gone down to the chambers of drunkenness and debauchery; and, with the young man mentioned by Solomon, descended through them to those of death and hell.

It may be worth while for those sober minded and, otherwise, judicious Christians, who are in the habit of attending fashionable parties at late hours, and taking their 'refreshments,' to consider whether they may not be a means of keeping up, by their example, those more vulgar assemblies, with all their grossness, which I have been describing. Is it not obvious that what the wine, and the fruit, and the oysters, are to the more refined and Christian circles, wine and fermented liquors may be to the more blunt sensibilities of body and mind, in youthful circles of another description? But if so, where rests the guilt? Or shall we bless the fountains, while we curse the stream they form?

Section III. Diseases of Licentiousness.

The importance of this and the foregoing section will be differently estimated by different individuals. They were not inserted, however, without consideration, nor without the approbation of persons who enjoy a large measure of public confidence. The young ought at least to know, briefly, to what a formidable host of maladies secret vice is exposed.

1. Insanity. The records of hospitals show that insanity, from solitary indulgence, is common. Tissot, Esquirol, Eberle, and others, give ample testimony on this point. The latter, from a careful examination of the facts, assures us that in Paris the proportion of insane persons whose diseases may be traced to the source in question, is one in from fifty-one to fifty-eight, in the lower classes. In the higher classes it is one in twenty-three. In the insane Hospital of Massachusetts—I have it from authority which I cannot question,—the proportion is at least one in three or four. At present there are about twenty cases of the kind alluded to.