That is the reason drinking liquor gets so many people—either by wrecking their health or by fastening on them the habit they cannot stop. They fool themselves. They are perfectly well aware that their neighbors are drinking too much—but not themselves. Far be it from them not to have the will-power to stop when it is time to stop. They are smarter than their neighbors. They know what they are doing. And suddenly the explosions come!
There are hundreds of thousands of men in all walks of life in this country who for twenty or thirty years have never lived a minute when there was not more or less alcohol in their systems, who cannot be said to have been strictly and entirely sober in all that time, but who do their work, perform all their social duties, make their careers and are fairly successful just the same.
There has been more flub-dub printed and spoken about drinking liquor than about any other employment, avocation, vocation, habit, practice or pleasure of mankind. Drinking liquor is a personal proposition, and nothing else. It is individual in every human relation. Still, you cannot make the reformers see that. They want other people to stop drinking because they want other people to stop. So they make laws that are violated, and get pledges that are broken and try to legislate or preach or coax or scare away a habit that must, in any successful outcome, be stopped by the individual, and not because of any law or threat or terror or cajolery.
This is the human-nature side of it, but the professional reformers know less about human nature, and care less, than about any other phase of life. Still, the fact remains that with any habit, and especially with the liquor habit—probably because that is the most prevalent habit there is—nine-tenths of the subjects delude themselves about how much of a habit they have; and, second, that nine-tenths of those with the habit have a very clear idea of the extent to which the habit is fastened on others. They are fooled about themselves, but never about their neighbors! Wherefore the breweries and the distilleries prosper exceedingly.
However, I am straying away from my story, which has to do with such drinking as the ordinary man does—not sprees, nor debauches, or orgies, or periodicals, or drunkenness, but just the ordinary amount of drinking that happens along in a man's life, with a little too much on rare occasions and plenty at all times. A German I knew once told me the difference between Old-World drinking and American drinking was that the German, for example, drinks for the pleasure of the drink, while the American drinks for the alcohol in it. That may be so; but very few men who have any sense or any age set out deliberately to get drunk. Such drunkenness as there is among men of that sort usually comes more by accident than by design.
My definition of a drunkard has always been this: A man is a drunkard when he drinks whisky or any other liquor before breakfast. I think that is pretty nearly right. Personally I never took a drink of liquor before breakfast in my life and not many before noon. Usually my drinking began in the afternoon after business, and was likely to end before dinnertime—not always, but usually.
CHAPTER III
WHAT I QUIT
I had been drinking thus for practically twenty years. I did not drink at all until after I was twenty-one and not much until after I was twenty-five. When I got to be thirty-two or thirty-three and had gone along a little in the world, I fell in with men of my own station; and as I lived in a town where nearly everybody drank, including many of the successful business and professional men—men of affairs—I soon got into their habits. Naturally gregarious, I found these men good company. They were sociable and convivial, and drank for the fun of it and the fun that came out of it.