=Effects of personal liberty.=--One day while campaigning a county in Missouri for local option, I called at a home to get directions to my next engagement to lecture. I rapped three times at the door. Three times a voice from within said, “Come in.” Finally, I opened the door and entered. A mother sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room holding in her arms a nine-year-old boy. I noticed that the boy was as helpless as a twenty-four-hour-old baby. While giving me directions she was feeding the boy with a spoon. I remarked, “Friend, I observe that you have in your arms an unfortunate child. I have studied many unfortunate cases, lectured a good deal on heredity and have written a book on heredity. If you do not object, I would like to ask you some questions about your child.” In tones of anguish, such as only a broken-hearted mother could utter, she said, “I guess that no poor mother has ever had to bear a greater burden than I have. This is my first child, on the bed is my fifth child, only six weeks old. When this boy was four years old, during a spell of whooping cough, he got into this condition. For five years I have cared for this boy as I would a helpless baby. During these five years I have become a mother three times and have buried three children who became as helpless as this one. The three that are dead were seemingly all right at birth, but became helpless during attacks of hives and teething. I don’t know whether we will be able to raise the baby or not.” No pen can portray, no tongue can tell, no imagination can conceive the heartaches of this unfortunate mother. I asked whether she and her husband were related by blood, or whether there had been intermarriage in the past on either side? She replied in the negative. I asked other questions and failed to locate the trouble. Finally, I asked, “Were there any drunkards on either side of your family?” “On my side of our family there were no drunkards; on the father’s side of my husband’s family one-half of the men were drunkards; on his mother’s side most of the men were drunkards,” was her reply. “Does your husband drink?” I enquired. With some embarrassment, she said, “He drinks, but never gets to where he can’t attend to business.” From other sources I found him to be a very heavy drinker. Such men often boast that they have a right to drink if they want to, get drunk if they want to, kill themselves if they want to. What right did that drunken father and his drunken ancestry have to inflame their minds and brutalize their passions and thereby burden that innocent woman with all that sacrifice, suffering and heartache and to bring these helpless little children into this world foredoomed to such defectiveness? I answer, they did not have the shadow of a right to indulge in a habit that would deprive their descendants from developing on the earth plane.