Page:The Female Advocate.djvu/78

 fatal alternative, either to be passive under the horrors of a prison, or compound for their preservation, by entering under the infernal roof of vice for protection.

When such an alternative is presented, what is to be expected? Should they evade the latter by conforming to the former, what is to be the advantage? I believe, it is generally allowed, that all prisons, or places of confinement, are but poor schools for virtue; and that youth and inexperience, or even those of a more advanced age, seldom return to the world without being, in some degree, contaminated; for it is not to be supposed, that these poor, miserable mortals are invulnerable. Indeed, should they even pass through these tracts unpolluted, it is next to impossible they should still escape destruction. After the death of kindred, faithlessness of friends, misfortunes, and disgrace, where are they to find a plank to save them from the wreck, where they see so many tossing up and down before them? and may very applicably say, with Pope's Sappho,