Immodest Dress and Moral Decline
The despatches say that a young woman in West Virginia appeared on the streets with one of11the much-talked-of slit gowns, with this variation, however,—that the slit extended down the back. She attracted such a mob around the station where she was seeking to board a train that the train was blocked for some fifteen minutes. We should make due allowances for the exaggerations that reporters get into such occurrences; but having made all of these allowances, we still have a superabundance of truth left to show the temper of a large majority of the people that make up society to-day. Some people seem to find no occasion for alarm in the things that are done; but women are appearing on the streets in dresses to-day that would have occasioned such an outburst of disgust twenty-five or thirty years ago that they would not have tried to appear the second time. People who have clear discernment, and who hold to the simple teachings of modesty and uprightness that are an essential part of the gospel of Christ, have no difficulty in seeing that the foundations of morality are being broken up. That is one reason why it is so hard to uproot commercialized vice and to break down the white slave traffic and kindred evils. The people are in too large numbers who either approve such things or else wink at them, or, what is possibly just as bad, are indifferent to them.