The Sedalia weekly bazoo. [volume] (Sedalia, Mo.) 187?-1904, 1882-05-30
WHERE ARE THEY?

aHOrds opportunity LOT OIL OF moral
izing upon a subject which appeal
very strongly to the fathers and moth
ers Of the land.
Here is young girl offifteen years,
of only fair personal attractions. mod
est and sensitive, who has been sud.
denly lost to her parents, mayhap to
the world, and for whose recovery
unceasing efforts are made by her
father, friends and the police force OF
great city, But they have found
her not.
In the search tor this girl some un.
expected and startling discoveries have
been made. Other missing girls have
been found; girls who have left the
protection and purity of their homes
to lead life of shame and ruin.
The story told by these girls is the
Old one of trust and then-ruin
Given all the liberty their young and
foolish hearts may desire, unguarded
by father and mother, permitted to
receive attention from rakish young
men before they have grown out of
short dresses, unrestrained from the
street, these young girls soon become
easy victims to lust and passion and
fall prey to the blackhearted devils
in nobby dress who lie in wait for
them.
No young girl is safe who is grant
ed the liberties of her own desires.
Social life in this day is peculiarly
dangerous to them. Its unblushing
freedom in the mingling of the sexes;
its balls, where lasciviousness boldly
clasps physical charms in its embrace
its parties, where too often shameless
liberties are to be seen; its failure to
recognize the beauty of true modesty
and the priceless worth of a holy vir-
tue; its silly and senseless SCOTS at
what it sneeringly calls pruderv, and
its liberty of speech and wealth of
slang, all conspire to drive the young
girl into life which at last turns to
bitterness and Voc.
This is no overdrawn picture, nor is
it the outgrowth ola morbid and Gym
ical nature. How true it is that there
is a criminal carelessness on the part
of too many parents in the control of
their daughter, just building into
that strange life we call maidenhood.
Mistaking parental over-indulgence as
evidence of parental love; anxious
that their daughters may have good
time before the stern duties of life
come upon them, too many fathers
and especially too many mothers loos-
en- the reins ofauthority and restraint,
and give the daughter her own sweet
and innocent inclinations and whims.
The girl of fifteen, to-day, is not a
girl. She is young lady, candi-
date for the attentions of the oppO-
site sex. a regular attendant at balls,
parties, and theatres, provided she has
personal charms and fair degree of
social standing.
Some day the girl is gone! Then
a distress, which no words can depict,
nor imagination picture out, comes to
father and mother as the awful fact
comes to them with crushing force.
Tears and groans and pieadings and
offered and days and nights
of sleepless agony and search for the
lost loved one, whose fate may be
worse than death, are theirs, and the
world pauses to give them, not the re-
stored II easure, but a cold word of un-
feeling rebuke for their responsibility
in this terrible and sad blow and ruin.
Why did she 60? 1t was the result of
the glitter and glamour of the life she .
has been prodigally spending. Day
by day. night by night, has her frail
and unpiloted bark been drawn nearer
and nearer into the whirling, seething
waters Of this mae!strom Of moral