I sketched my first contacts with alcohol,told of my first intoxications and revulsions,and pointed out always the one thing that in the end had won me over--namely,the accessibility of alcohol.Not only had it always been accessible,but every interest of my developing life had drawn me to it.A newsboy on the streets,a sailor,a miner,a wanderer in far lands,always where men came together to exchange ideas,to laugh and boast and dare,to relax,to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and days,always they came together over alcohol.The saloon was the place of congregation.Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the cave.
I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been barred in the South Pacific,where the kinky-haired cannibals escaped from their womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves,the sacred precincts taboo to women under pain of death.As a youth,by way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of woman's influence into the wide free world of men.All ways led to the saloon.The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together in the saloon,and thence led out and on over the world.
"The point is,"I concluded my sermon,"that it is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol.
I did not care for it.I used to laugh at it.Yet here I am,at the last,possessed with the drinker's desire.It took twenty years to implant that desire;and for ten years more that desire has grown.And the effect of satisfying that desire is anything but good.Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and merry.Yet when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation of intellectual pessimism.
"But,"I hastened to add (I always hasten to add),"John Barleycorn must have his due.He does tell the truth.That is the curse of it.The so-called truths of life are not true.They are the vital lies by which life lives,and John Barleycorn gives them the lie.""Which does not make toward life,"Charmian said.
"Very true,"I answered."And that is the perfectest hell of it.
John Barleycorn makes toward death.That is why I voted for the amendment to-day.I read back in my life and saw how the accessibility of alcohol had given me the taste for it.You see,comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation.And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it.The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol,but with actual repugnance toward it.Not the first,nor the twentieth,nor the hundredth drink,succeeded in giving them the liking.But they learned,just as men learn to smoke;though it is far easier to learn to smoke than to learn to drink.They learned because alcohol was so accessible.The women know the game.They pay for it--the wives and sisters and mothers.And when they come to vote,they will vote for prohibition.And the best of it is that there will be no hardship worked on the coming generation.Not having access to alcohol,not being predisposed toward alcohol,it will never miss alcohol.It will mean life more abundant for the manhood of the young boys born and growing up--ay,and life more abundant for the young girls born and growing up to share the lives of the young men.""Why not write all this up for the sake of the men and women coming?"Charmian asked."Why not write it so as to help the wives and sisters and mothers to the way they should vote?""The 'Memoirs of an Alcoholic,'"I sneered--or,rather,John Barleycorn sneered;for he sat with me there at table in my pleasant,philanthropic jingle,and it is a trick of John Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer without an instant's warning.
"No,"said Charmian,ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness,as so many women have learned to do."You have shown yourself no alcoholic,no dipsomaniac,but merely an habitual drinker,one who has made John Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of rubbing shoulders with him.Write it up and call it 'Alcoholic Memoirs.'"
