the long sad road.
It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck,
chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the fires
of John Barleycorn. My life, my career, my joy in living, have
not been destroyed. They have been scorched, it is true; like the
survivors of forlorn hopes, they have by unthinkably miraculous
ways come through the fight to marvel at the tally of the slain.
And like such a survivor of old red war who cries out, “Let there
be no more war!” so I cry out, “Let there be no more poison-
fighting by our youths!” The way to stop war is to stop it. The
way to stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped the
general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation and
importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of
China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for
a thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as opium was ever
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accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated. We are
so made, that is all.
We have with great success made a practice of not leaving arsenic
and strychnine, and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around
for our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barleycorn the
same way. Stop him. Don’t let him lie around, licensed and
legal, to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics nor for
alcoholics do I write, but for our youths, for those who possess
no more than the adventure-stings and the genial predispositions,
the social man-impulses, which are twisted all awry by our
barbarian civilisation which feeds them poison on all the corners.
It is the healthy, normal boys, now born or being born, for whom I
write.
It was for this reason, more than any other, and more ardently
than any other, that I rode down into the Valley of the Moon, all
a-jingle, and voted for equal suffrage. I voted that women might
vote, because I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race,
would vote John Barleycorn out of existence and back into the
historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If I thus
seem to cry out as one hurt, please remember that I have been
sorely bruised and that I do dislike the thought that any son or
daughter of mine or yours should be similarly bruised.
The women are the true conservators of the race. The men are the
wastrels, the adventure-lovers and gamblers, and in the end it is
by their women that they are saved. About man’s first experiment
in chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all the
generations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drink
it. And there has never been a day when the women have not
resented man’s use of alcohol, though they have never had the
power to give weight to their resentment. The moment women get
the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do is
to close the saloons. In a thousand generations to come men of
themselves will not close the saloons. As well expect the
morphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out of
existence.
The women know. They have paid an incalculable price of sweat and
tears for man’s use of alcohol. Ever jealous for the race, they
will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born; and for the
babes of girls, too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and
sisters of these boys.
And it will be easy. The only ones that will be hurt will be the
topers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation. I am one of
these, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with
John Barleycorn, that it won’t hurt me very much to stop drinking
when no one else drinks and when no drink is obtainable. On the
other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are so
normally non-alcoholic, that, never having had access to alcohol,
they will never miss it. They will know of the saloon only in the
pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaint
old custom similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches.
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CHAPTER XXXIX
Of course, no personal tale is complete without bringing the
narrative of the person down to the last moment. But mine is no
tale of a reformed drunkard. I was never a drunkard, and I have
not reformed.
It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and
forty-eight days in a windjammer around the Horn. I took no
private supply of alcohol along, and, though there was no day of
those one hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a
drink from the captain, I did not take a drink. I did not take a
drink because I did not desire a drink. No one else drank on
board. The atmosphere for drinking was not present, and in my
system there was no organic need for alcohol. My chemistry did
not demand alcohol.
So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem:
THIS IS SO EASY, WHY NOT KEEP IT UP WHEN YOU GET BACK ON LAND? I
weighed this problem carefully. I weighed it for five months, in
a state of absolute non-contact with alcohol. And out of the data
of past experience, I reached certain conclusions.
In the first place, I am convinced that not one man in ten
thousand or in a hundred thousand is a genuine, chemical
dipsomaniac. Drinking, as I deem it, is practically entirely a
habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco, or cocaine, or morphine, or
all the rest of the long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is
quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of mental
training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil. Not one
drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers begin
socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social
connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in
the first part of this narrative. These social connotations are
the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed. The part
that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable when compared with the
part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The
human is rarely born these days, who, without long training in the
social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical
propulsion of his system toward alcohol. I do assume that such
rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered one.
On this long, five-months’ voyage, I found that among all my
bodily needs not the slightest shred of a bodily need for alcohol
existed. But this I did find: my need was mental and social.
When I thought of alcohol, the connotation was fellowship. When I
thought of fellowship, the connotation was alcohol. Fellowship
and alcohol were Siamese twins. They always occurred linked
together.
Thus, when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others,
practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly
aroused the connotation of drinking and good fellows. Big nights
and days and moments, all purple passages and freedoms, thronged
my memory. “Venice” stares at me from the printed page, and I
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119
remember the cafe tables on the sidewalks. “The Battle of
Santiago,” some one says, and I answer, “Yes, I’ve been over the
ground.” But I do not see the ground, nor Kettle Hill, nor the
Peace Tree. What I see is the Cafe Venus, on the plaza of
Santiago, where one hot night I drank and talked with a dying
consumptive.
The East End of London, I read, or some one says; and first of
all, under my eyelids, leap the visions of the shining pubs, and
in my ears echo the calls for “two of bitter” and “three of
Scotch.” The Latin Quarter–at once I am in the student cabarets,
bright faces and keen spirits around me, sipping cool, well-
dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar in Latin fashion
as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of the simple
problems of existence.
In a pampero off the River Plate we speculate, if we are disabled,
of running in to Buenos Ayres, the “Paris of America,” and I have
visions of bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of
raised glasses, and of song and cheer and the hum of genial
voices. When we have picked up the North-east Trades in the
Pacific we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu,
and while I persuade I see myself again drinking cocktails on the
cool lanais and fizzes out at Waikiki where the surf rolls in.
Some one mentions the way wild ducks are cooked in the restaurants
of San Francisco, and at once I am transported to the light and