The foregoing is a sample roaming with the White Logic through the dusk
of my soul.
To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a
man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barleycorn. And the
reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an
hour, is but one mood of the myriad moods of John Barleycorn, and that
the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many
a day and week and month.
My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any strong,
chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the
planet is my unmerited luck--the luck of chest, and shoulders, and
constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in
the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the
stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and
seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished
the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the
tale. I survived, through no personal virtue, but because I did not have
the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I possessed an organism
unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barleycorn. And, surviving, I
have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all 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 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.