between ourselves and the litigious.  The medical profession has nursed poisoners enough to have baned all the rats of christendom; but the resolute patient must still have his prescription—­if he die for it.  Shall we disband our armies because in the hand of an ambitious madman a field-marshal’s baton may brain a helpless State?—­our navies because in ships pirates have “sailed the seas over?” Let us not commit the vulgarity of condemning the dance because of its possibilities of perversion by the vicious and the profligate.  Let us not utter us in hot bosh and baking nonsense, but cleave to reason and the sweet sense of things.

Dancing never made a good girl bad, nor turned a wholesome young man to evil ways.  “Opportunity!” simpers the tedious virgin past the wall-flower of her youth.  “Opportunity!” cackles the blase beau who has outlasted his legs and gone deaconing in a church.

Opportunity, indeed!  There is opportunity in church and school-room, in social intercourse.  There is opportunity in libraries, art-galleries, picnics, street-cars, Bible-classes and at fairs and matinees.  Opportunity—­rare, delicious opportunity, not innocently to be ignored—­in moonlight rambles by still streams.  Opportunity, such as it is, behind the old gentleman’s turned back, and beneath the good mother’s spectacled nose.  You shall sooner draw out leviathan with a hook, or bind Arcturus and his sons, than baffle the upthrust of Opportunity’s many heads.  Opportunity is a veritable Hydra, Argus and Briareus rolled into one.  He has a hundred heads to plan his poachings, a hundred eyes to spy the land, a hundred hands to set his snares and springes.  In the country where young girls are habitually unattended in the street; where the function of chaperon is commonly, and, it should be added, intelligently performed by some capable young male; where the young women receive evening calls from young men concerning whose presence in the parlor mamma in the nursery and papa at the “office”—­poor, overworked papa!—­give themselves precious little trouble,—­this prate of ball-room opportunity is singularly and engagingly idiotic.  The worthy people who hold such language may justly boast themselves superior to reason and impregnable to light.  The only effective reply to these creatures would be a cuffing, the well meant objections of another class merit the refutation of distinct characterization.  It is the old talk of devotees about sin, of topers concerning water, temperance men of gin, and albeit it is neither wise nor witty, it is becoming in us at whom they rail to deal mercifully with them.  In some otherwise estimable souls one of these harmless brain cracks may be a right lovable trait of character.

Issues of a social import as great as a raid against dancing have been raised ere now.  Will the coming man smoke?  Will the coming man drink wine?  These tremendous and imperative problems only recently agitated some of the “thoughtful minds” in our midst.  By degrees they lost their preeminence, they were seen to be in process of solution without social cataclysm, they have, in a manner been referred for disposal to the coming man himself, that is to say, they have been dropped, and are to-day as dead as Julius Caesar.  The present hour has, in its turn, produced its own awful problem:  Will the coming woman waltz?