Your friend drinks too much, or drinks temperately but unwisely.
You may entreat, or argue, or abuse, or threaten.
You may show your friend the happy home where rum never enters.
You may lead him through the alcoholic ward at Bellevue.
Such sights may produce an impression. But usually they do not.
The man who possesses, indulges and keenly enjoys an overwhelming
passion--for drink or any other vice--is rarely moved by your
fine talk, for the reason that he believes in his wily soul that
you do not know what you are talking about.
Mr. Lecky, in his history of European morals, page 135, volume
I., observes:
"That which makes it so difficult for a man of strong, vicious
passions to unbosom himself to a naturally virtuous man is not so
much the virtue as THE IGNORANCE OF THE LATTER."
You are naturally virtuous. Your drinking friend is naturally
and proudly bad. He thinks you do not know what you are talking
about when you ask him to give up drink. ----
When you start out to cure a vicious friend by arguing with
him, do you ever reflect how little you know what goes on within
him? Suppose that in his nerves there is a craving ten thousand
times louder and stronger than your most virtuous arguments?
What good will those arguments do? No use whispering poetry to a
man in a boiler shop. No use humming a love song in a whirlwind.
The poetry, the song, are out of place. Any sort of argument
save the most powerful is wasted on a man whose soul is filled
with the racket of a dominating passion, such as drink or
gambling. ----
Just two things can cure a drunkard--two things, and nothing else
on earth.
First, his own cold reason and strength of will.
Second, the growth within him of some passion stronger than his
love of drink.
Love of his children, love of a woman, will cure a drunkard (but
we earnestly advise any woman to make sure he is cured before
trusting her future to him). Ambition--which includes every form
of vanity and self-delusion--will cure a drunkard, and has cured
many thousands. Even the miser's passion of economy may outweigh
love of drink and cure the lesser desire. ----
To cure a drunkard, try to arouse within him some desire stronger
than his desire to drink. Any boy will stop smoking to play
football or to excel in any sort of athletics. You reach his
vanity. What preaching could produce the same effect?
If you feel that you must use argument, try such arguments as
will appeal to the man himself, not such as seem sound to you in
your fine state of virtue.
The American drunkard is usually manufactured by the vile
American habit of drinking pure whiskey or cocktails. No other
race, except among the most degraded classes, absorbs crude
spirits as stupidly as this race. ----
Suppose you have a young friend whose tendency to drink
"straight" whiskey makes you nervous. You see what it is leading
to. Instead of trying to make a teetotaler of him, try to
transform him into a sensible drinker. ----
When your friend orders his whiskey, start off as follows:
Tell him you take it for granted that he knows all about the
mucous membrane. He will say that he does--for it is our
American mania to want to appear wise.
Casually state that of course he knows the covering of his
eyeball is identical in all important respects--especially as
regards sensitiveness--with the lining of his stomach; in fact,
of his whole interior from his mouth down.
He will assent and gravely pour out his poison.
Then say to him:
"Just dip the tip of your finger in that whiskey and put the
finger to your eye-ball."
If he does so he will feel the eye smart. The eyeball will
become inflamed, and sight for a moment will be difficult.
Then let him dilute the whiskey with water--four or five parts
water to one of whiskey. That dilution, rubbed into the other
eye, instead of irritating it, will act as a gentle stimulant.
It will produce an agreeable effect.
When your friend has experimented with the whiskey "straight" and
diluted, deliver to him this little lecture:
"One drop of pure whiskey on your eyeball makes it hard to use
the eye. That glass of whiskey that you are now pouring into
yourself would blind you absolutely, at least for a time. If
straight whiskey has such an effect on the covering of the
eyeball, must not its effect be equally injurious to the covering
of the stomach and intestines, which is the same as that of the
eye?
"If diluting your whiskey makes it so much better as an eye-wash,
would not diluting it make it better also as a 'stomach-wash'?"
One other thing: When you argue with a drunkard don't tell him
that any man can cure himself if he will "only be a man." The
drunkard knows that that is not so. Tell him, on the contrary,
that not one man in fifty, not one woman in a hundred, can
overcome the drink habit.
He will wink his tired eyes at you and say: "I want you
distinctly to understand that I'm one in a hundred." Tell him
how difficult it is--not how easy--and thus stir up his ambition.
----
Above all, when you start out to admonish or despise the victim
of bad habits, just remember that you have no notion whatever of
what you criticise. Not one drunkard in a hundred has will power
to cure himself. Not one "virtuous" man in a thousand has
imagination enough to realize the drunkard's temptation and
suffering. We offer to your consideration this other extract
from Lecky's book, quoted above:
"The great majority of uncharitable judgments in the world may be
traced to a deficiency of imagination. * * * To realize with any
adequacy the force of a passion we have never experienced, to
conceive a type of character radically different from our own, *
* * requires a power of imagination which is among the rarest of
human endowments."