A woman stooped over her stove in her own kitchen one winter evening, making food for her eight-months-old baby, whom she held in her arms. Her husband and her brother-in-law, with a bottle of whiskey, carried on a lively dispute in another part of the kitchen. She did not enter into the dispute, but went on with her work. Surely this woman was protected; here was the sacred precincts of home, her husband, sworn to protect her, her child in her arms--a beautiful domesticated Madonna scene. But when the revolver was fired accidentally it blew off the whole top of her protected head; and the mother and babe fell to the floor! Who was the invader? and, tell me, would you call that a fair deal? The people who oppose democratic principles tell us that there is no such thing as equality--that, if you made every person exactly equal today, there would be inequality tomorrow. We know there is no such thing as equality of achievement, but what we plead for is equality of chance, equality of opportunity. We know that absolute equality of opportunity is hardly possible, but we can make it more nearly possible by the removal of all movable handicaps from the human race. The liquor traffic, with its resultant poverty, hits the child in the cradle, whose innocence and helplessness makes its appeal all the stronger. The liquor traffic is a tangible, definite thing that we can locate without difficulty. Many of the causes of poverty and sin are illusive, indefinite qualities such as bad management, carelessness, laziness, extravagance, ignorance and bad judgment, which are exceedingly hard to remedy, but the liquor traffic is one of the things we can speak of definitely, and in removing it we are taking a step in the direction of giving everybody a fair start. When the Boer War was on, the British War Office had to lower the standard for the army because not enough men could be found to measure up to the previous standard, and an investigation was made into the causes which had led to the physical deterioration of the race. Ten families whose parents were both drinkers were compared with ten families whose parents were both abstainers, and it was found that the drinking parents had out of their fifty-seven children only ten that were normal, while the non-drinking parents, out of their sixty-one children, had fifty-four normal children and only seven that were abnormal in any way. They chose families in as nearly as possible the same condition of life and the same scale of intelligence. It would seem from this that no country which legalizes the liquor traffic is giving a fair deal to its children!