"What are you going to have?"
The bartender spreads out his hands on the edge of the bar, attentive and prepared to work quickly.
Every man insists on "buying" something to drink in his turn.
Each takes what the others insist on giving him.
Each thinks that he is hospitable.
But the bartender KNOWS that those men belong to the Great American Association for the Manufacture of Drunkards through "treating."
Each of those men might perhaps take his glass of beer, or even something worse, with relative safety. But, as stupidly as stampeded animals pushing each other over a precipice, each insists on buying poison in his turn. And every one spends his money to make every other one, if possible, a hard-drinking and a wasted man. ——
You, Sir. Reader, have seen all these types and many others, have you not?
WHY did you see them? What REASON had you for seeing them?
The bartender stands studying the procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of clean-aproned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the multitude to perdition on the other side of the river. But what is YOUR business there?
You might as well be found inside an opium den.