HOW AMERICAN GIRLS ARE CORRUPTED.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 336, 26 September 1879, Page 7

HOW AMERICAN GIRLS ARE CORRUPTED.

[From the Catholic Standard.] One of the New York dailies the other day reported the capture by the police of a young girl of respectable parentage who had left her home because it was " too dull and stuffy " there. Accoiding to her account, she had nothing particular to complain of. Her parents were kind and affectionate. She was provided with everything necessary to comfort. But she had gotten to reading story papers and dime novels, and the quiet of the parental home became too dull for her. She wanted to see the world and enjoy life, and so she ran off to New York, and was picked up by the police in the midst of disreputable company. On the magistrate questioning her as to her reasons for leaving home, she made the reply we have given above. To his counsels that she should return to her parents and shun such society as she had been found in, she defiantly replied that if she were compelled to return to her home, she would run away again as soon as she could. The warnings of the magistrate as to the pain and agony such a course would cause her parents, and the shame and certain ruin it would bring upon herself, seemed to have no effect. Her whole character had been infected with the false and pernicious notions which pervade the stories that have come to foim the staple reading of a large portion of our boys and girls. She cared only for excitement. Her mind had become utterly debased and filled with unhealthy longings and imaginings. To this same cause we believe may be traced a very large proportion of the youthful crime of the day. You can scarcely pick up a newspaper but you see an account of young girls, perhaps a mere child in years, absconding from home and plunging into the world and into debauchery ; and when the

antecedents that have led to this are sought for, in nine cases out of ten they will be found in the miserable, sensational, demoralizing reading matter they have devoured. So with boys. Little fellows of eight, ten and twelve years of age have of late been frequently arrested for attempting crimes which it might have been supposed none but confirmed desperate villains would dare to perpetrate When questioned, it has been found that almost without exception they were habitual readers of sensational newspaper stories, dime novels, and Police Gazette literatuie. Thus their youthful imaginations were fired with the idea of becoming heroes like the villains they read of. and their youthful wits set to work to plan something, the commission of which would thrill the public with horror. Nor are this youthful criminality and viciousness by any means confined to the " lower classes,'" to the children of the poor or of parents who are themselves vicious. Many of them are boys and girls whose parents are well-to-do as regards this world, children who have comtortable homes, but who have become infatuated through the detestaole newspapers and books they have read. Is it not time for parents to look into this matter ? The country is flooded with trash published specially for the young, much of it written by authors who wish to be considered respectable, and bearing the imprint of respectable publishing houses. The most dangerous portion, too, of this trash seems to a superficial examiner harmless, to be at worst only silly and exaggerated, and highly colored. But in these seemingly innocent exaggerations and high colourings lies hid a subtle poison. It dissatisfies its readers with their commonplace routine of youthful duties, with subordination to the authority of parents and teachers. It causes them to long to be independent, to strike out in lite for themselves, to become men and women at once, though they have not yet outgrown the garb of childhood. It simulates precociously their imaginations and passions and prepares them for vice and crime. Many a father and mother who mourn in agony hopes Dlasted in a ruined daughter or son might find the cause, if disposed to review the past, in his or her own neglect to supervise and direct what that daughter or son habitually read when a child. There is a responsibility here which few parents, it is greatly to be feared, fully realise or faithfully discharge. There are parents who carefully endeavour to guard their children against forming intimacies with other children by whom their morals might bs corrupted, but who exercise no care as to what boolis and papers their children seek companionship with. Yet in this age of universal reading, the latter is a danger almost, if not quite, as serious as the former, and one that should be vigilantly guarded against.