_fashionable_ balls and dancing parties is wholly without any evil
design--innocently following a fashion--and if those who thus dress are
really ignorant of the effect it has upon the opposite sex, it is high
time their eyes were being opened. If this be only a fashion, and I want
to believe it is nothing more, but when I remember distinctly that this
manner of dressing for balls and dancing parties has been the fashion
for forty years and that it has never changed, _except to become a
little more so_, and that all other fashions have changed at least
twenty times, my belief staggers and hangs its head for very shame. This
fruit alone has sent hundreds of thousands of men, women and girls to
premature graves, dishonored graves, felons' cells, and to an endless
hell. That this semi-nude condition, in which many girls and women are
seen in the dance, has been productive of a vast deal of sin and crime,
no honest man certainly will deny. In the whirl of the gay and giddy
dance, we see:

Strong men and women fair
Are now within the tempter's snare,
With arms around each slender waist,
Each woman held in _close embrace_.

If all the _thoughts_ could be made known
Of seeds of crime which here are sown,
'Twould cause the _hardest_ cheek to blush
And every _virtuous_ heart would crush.

But so it is, and ere must be,
While men and women thus agree
_To tempt themselves, and others too_,
TO SINS AND CRIMES OF DEADLY HUE.