"A young fellow of twenty can start in the army with many a worse handicap than a debt of honor and a determination to work it off. That steadies him. That matter really gives me less care than you thought for. It is the other—your giving way to an impulse to drink—that fills me with concern. You come up like a man, admit your fault, and say you deserve and expect my severe censure. Well, I've thought it all over, Sandy. My heart and my arms go out to you in your distress and humiliation, and—I have not one word of reproach or blame to give you.
"For now I shall tell you what I had thought to say when your graduation drew nigh, had we been able to master mechanics and molecules and other mathematical rot as useful to a cavalry officer as a binocular to a blind man, and that I ought to have told you when you started out for yourself as a young ranchero, but could not bring myself to it so long as you seemed to have no inclination that way. Times, men, and customs have greatly changed in the last forty or fifty years, my boy, and greatly for the better. Looking back over my boyhood, I can recall no day when wine was not served on your grandfather's table. The brightest minds and bravest men in all Kentucky pledged each other day and night in the cup that sometimes cheers and ofttimes inebriates, and no public occasion was complete without champagne and whiskey in abundance, no personal or private transaction considered auspicious unless appropriately 'wet.'
"Those were days when our statesmen revelled in sentiment and song, and drank and gambled with the fervor of the followers of the races. I was a boy of tender years then, and often, with my playmates, I was called from our merry games to join the gentlemen over their wine and drain a bumper to our glorious 'Harry of the West,' and before I went to the Point, Sandy, I knew the best, and possibly the worst, whiskeys made in Kentucky,—we all did,—and the man or youth who could not stand his glass of liquor was looked upon as a milksop or pitied, and yet, after all, respected, as a 'singed cat,'—a fellow who owned that John Barleycorn was too much for him, and he did not dare a single round with him.
"Then came the great war, and wars are always in one way demoralizing. West Point in the early sixties was utterly unlike the West Point of to-day, and no worse than a dozen of our greatest colleges. The corps still had its tales and traditions of the old time Fourth-of-July dinners at the mess hall, when everybody made a dash for the decanters and drank everything in sight. It was the only day in the year on which wine was served. It was in my time the invariable custom for the superintendent to receive the Board of Visitors on the day of their arrival at his quarters and to invite the officers and the graduating class to meet them, and to set forth, as for years had been the fashion at Washington, wine and punch in abundance, and the very officers detailed as our instructors would laughingly invite and challenge the youngsters so soon to shed the gray and wear the blue to drink with them again and again. I have seen dozens of the best and bravest of our fellows come reeling and shouting back to barracks, and a thoughtless set of boys laughing and applauding.
"I was stationed at the Point soon after graduation, and the men who drank were the rule, not the exception. Social visits were rarely exchanged without the introduction of the decanter. The marvel is that so many were 'temperate in our meat and drink,' as my father and grandfather used to plead when, regularly every morning, the family and the negro servants were mustered for prayers. At every post where I was stationed, either in the East or where I was most at home,—the far frontier,—whiskey was the established custom, and man after man, fellows who had made fine records during the war, and bright boys with whom I had worn the gray at the Point, fell by the wayside and were court-martialled out of service.
"In '70 and '71 we had a Board that swept the army like a seine and relegated scores of tipplers to civil life, but that didn't stop it. Little by little the sense and manhood of our people began to tell. Little by little the feeling against stimulant began to develop at the Point. It was no longer a joke to set a fledgling officer to taste the tempter—it was a crime. Four years after I was commissioned we had only one total abstainer out of some fifty officers at the mess, and he was a man whose life and honor depended on it. Three years ago, when I went to see you, there were dozens at the mess who never drank at all, and only eight who even smoked. Athletics and rifle-practice had much to do with this, I know, but there has gradually developed all over our land, notably in those communities where the custom used to be most honored in the observance, a total revulsion of sentiment.
"Quarter of a century ago, even among many gently nurtured women, the sight of a man overcome by liquor excited only sorrow and sympathy; now it commands nothing less than abhorrence. I and my surviving contemporaries started in life under the old system. You, my dear boy, are more fortunate in having begun with the new. Among the old soldiers there are still some few votaries of Bacchus who have to count their cups most carefully or risk their commissions. Among those under forty our army has far more total abstainers than all the others in the world, and such soldiers as Grant, Crook, Merritt, and Upton, of our service, and Kitchener of Khartoum, are on record as saying that the staying powers of the teetotaller exceed those even of the temperate man, and staying power is a thing to cultivate.
"As you know, I have never banished wine from our table, my boy. Both your mother and I had been accustomed to seeing it in daily use from childhood, yet she rarely touches it, even at our dinners. But, Sanford, I sent John Barleycorn to the right about the day your blessed mother promised to be my wife, and though I always keep it in the sideboard for old comrades whose heads and stomachs are still sound, and who find it agrees with them better than wine, I never offer it to the youngsters. They don't need it, Sandy, and no more do you.
"But you come of a race that lived as did their fellow-men,—to whom cards, the bottle, and betting were everyday affairs. It would be remarkable if you never developed a tendency towards one or all of them, and it was my duty to warn you before. I mourn every hour I wasted over cards and every dollar I ever won from a comrade more than—much more than—the many hundred dollars I lost in my several years' apprenticeship to poker. It's just about the poorest investment of time a soldier can devise.
"Knowing all I do, and looking back over the path of my life, strewn as it is with the wrecks of fellow-men ruined by whiskey, I declare if I could live it over again it would be with the determination never to touch a card for money or a glass for liquor.