PARLOR DANCING.
Some contend that there is no harm in parlor dancing. How many parents are able to restrict their children to parlor dancing only? Not one in ten thousand.
Dancing is too fascinating, and they who were at first content with parlor dancing soon want something else, and will, for the sake of dancing, go to almost any place.
If private dancing is allowed, and all else strictly forbidden, the child will often deceive his parents and dance at times and in places that they know not of.
I have known young people to be at Sunday night dances, and in low company, when their parents (who only allow parlor dancing) thought they were at church.
They made a practice of going to the church and remaining long enough to get the text of the pastor's discourse, and then going away to spend the time in dancing, and if questioned, they were able to give the text of the evening's sermon, and the trusting parents would not dream of their having been any where but at church.
I only wish that certain parents, who think they are restricting their children to "parlor dancing at home only," could have been with me the night of May 30th, 1892, and seen, as I did, their girls, some of them but twelve or fourteen years of age, dancing in a public saloon, where so much beer had been spilt on the floor that the women had to hold their dresses up to keep them from getting soiled and wet as they danced.
This is usually the result of teaching the child to dance and then restricting them to home dancing. If they once become fascinated with it they must and will, by some means, fair or foul, have more of it than their homes afford.
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.
The matron of a home for fallen women in Los Angeles, says: "Seven-tenths of the girls received here have fallen through dancing and its influence."
Of course, some of these, either from inherited passion or evil education, have deliberately and of free choice entered upon a life of shame; but the great majority do so under the stress of temptation; sometimes because of poverty or chafing against uncongenial employment, with meager wages. They are told that in the profession of prostitution, they can, if they are lucky, make more in a single night than they could by sewing a week.
Can you wonder that many a girl, aroused by the waltz and then lured by such glittering bait, is led to sell herself, soul and body, to those who make use of her and then cast her aside for another?
And yet ball-rooms, where this corruption germinates, flourish and are countenanced by many preachers of the gospel, and attended and encouraged by church members whose pastors have not the moral courage to condemn the evil, for fear of offending some of their members who dance.
The ministers, in a great measure, set the standard of morality in our land, and when they will rise to the occasion and make a long strike, a strong strike, a strike altogether against this ball-room curse, Christian people will strike with them. Then, and not until then, will this evil be wiped out.
It is at the cause and not the effect that the strike must be made.
In some cities the advisability of closing all the houses of prostitution by laws has been discussed.
One might as well try to stop the Mississippi river from flowing by damming it at its mouth, as to try to stop this great stream of vice by closing the doors of the brothel.
To dam the river at its mouth would only cause it to overflow its banks and seek another outlet, and to close the doors of the brothels on one street would only drive them to another.
To stop this great tide of sin we must begin at its source. To close the doors of the brothel, close first the doors of the dancing school.