Reformers, you see, lack discrimination. One might as well deplore Niagara Falls because a few fools plunge into its roaring torrents; cease to enjoy its beauty because suicides have taken advantage of its power and height to hurl themselves into eternity. One might as well say that no more skyscrapers are to be built, simply because now and then a man leaps from the top of one, and makes a ghastly mess of himself on the pavement below.
Robert Louis Stevenson used to say that the little superfluities of life were what made it lovely—yes, and bearable. Living does not consist in a mere drab drudgery from day to day, proving oneself “efficient,” turning out, in orderly fashion, so many mechanical instruments, with no release from humdrum. Life must contain zest and ardor and variety. That zest and ardor and variety we human beings ourselves give or bring to it. There must be a garnishing of the dish of existence once in a while. We cannot have our days served up monotonously on a dull platter, see them flung upon the banquet table without a surrounding decoration of loveliness. Ugliness must be hidden; and sane fun must play its part in the scheme of things.
Now it is obvious that drunkenness is a form of bestial ugliness, and should never be encouraged. Even we who are not professional reformers recognize that. But the right kind of mild drinking—the drinking of wines, which helps digestion by giving the proper spur to the gastric juices—is a salutary habit, and does no one any harm. In France I have never seen anyone intoxicated—except a visiting American; and I fear, with Prohibition, that more than ever will the cafés and streets of Paris be littered with shameful and shameless fellow countrymen of mine. The French learn from childhood how to drink; and a picture in a recent Parisian journal showed a group of three generations of wine-growers chosen at hazard from among many others. I never looked upon sturdier representatives of what some of our forlorn know-nothings would doubtless call a “decadent” people.
Alcoholism is practically unknown among the Latin races. To go over the border into a sodden state of imbecility is well-nigh unthinkable to them. France got rid of absinthe when she realized the danger of that fiery liquid. She did not have to close up and seal and nail down every café in every city and hamlet just because a handful of ribald artists thought it smart to sit all afternoon and dream dreams of pink elephants. And, the instant absinthe became unlawful, the French obeyed the edict, accepted the truth that a menace had been removed, and went on consuming an occasional aperitif and light wines—never cocktails and highballs.
But the American people, through their reformers, always have to go to extremes. We could not see the wisdom of cutting out or controlling hard drinking. We had to slam every door of every saloon; and, not content with that, we had to “mop up” the entire country—or ridiculously try to do so—until there should be no drop of beer, even, on anybody’s premises. Then, the moment we had done that, we forthwith craved a little liquor—because we couldn’t get it. Humanly enough, we were sorry that we had been so rash. True, we had rid ourselves of one of the most abhorrent evidences of our so-called civilization—the saloon with the swinging-door; but in doing so we had destroyed, or attempted to destroy, the harmless pleasure of men and women who had never entered a saloon. We punished everybody, in order to punish a few.
This was not the right process. The folly of our reformers is working incalculable harm to the entire country. And the end is not yet.
CHAPTER XIX
IS EUROPE GOING DRY?
If William E., otherwise known as “Pussyfoot,” Johnson has his way, Europe, too, will know the great drouth. It is something to have lost one’s eye in a cause, and still to retain one’s nerve and enthusiasm.