And Tibbitts having got fairly launched upon the wide ocean of drinking continued:
“Americans are fools in their way of drinking. All other peoples have a defined idea of what they want to accomplish with stimulants, but the American has not. Your Englishman wants to get stupid drunk; he wants forgetfulness, which I can’t blame him for. Were I living in England I should want forgetfulness in large doses. I don’t blame an Englishman, condemned to London climate and London customs, for drinking. The Frenchman and German drink just enough to produce the requisite hilarity, the general good feeling which light stimulants in moderation produces, and then they quit. An American does nothing of the sort. He drinks through all the stages, the slightly exhilerant, the mild hilarious, the boisterous idiotic, the brutally quarrelsome, the pitiful maudlin, and then slips off his chair harmless because helpless.
“Why, I have heard a nine-tenths drunken man rouse up his companion by shaking him, with the appeal: ‘Jimmy, rouse up! Can’t you stand another one?’
WHY MR. TIBBITTS WAS NOT A TEMPERANCE LECTURER.
“Just think of it! In this fellow’s case there was no pleasure to be had from the drinking of ‘another one.’ His poor, outraged stomach rebelled against it, the very smell of it was death, and the taste worse than death, and yet he was asked if he could not endure ‘another one!’ He was asked if his abused system could not be further outraged. And he did manage to stagger up to the bar and swallow another dose of poison, which was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. His indignant stomach deposited it on the floor with great promptness. A moment’s rest, and he did take ‘another one,’ and subsided into a miserable sleep.
“I have seen so much of the infernalism of the American treating system that I could deliver a wonderful lecture upon that and kindred temperance subjects.”
“Why don’t you lecture on temperance?” asked one of the party.
“Alas! I am not a reformed drunkard,” was Tibbitts reply.
Then up spoke the Young Man who Knows Everything.
“My dear sir, all you have to do is to reform.”