John Barleycorn | Page 4

together to exchange ideas, to
laugh and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome
nights and days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon
was the place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men
gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of
the cave.
I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been
barred in the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals escaped
from their womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves, the sacred
precincts taboo to women under pain of death. As a youth, by way of
the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of woman's influence
into the wide free world of men. All ways led to the saloon. The
thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together in the saloon,
and thence led out and on over the world.
"The point is," I concluded my sermon, "that it is the accessibility of
alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it. I
used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the
drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire; and for ten
years more that desire has grown. And the effect of satisfying that
desire is anything but good. Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted
and merry. Yet when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the
damnation of intellectual pessimism.
"But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John Barleycorn
must have his due. He does tell the truth. That is the curse of it. The

so-called truths of life are not true. They are the vital lies by which life
lives, and John Barleycorn gives them the lie."
"Which does not make toward life," Charmian said.
"Very true," I answered. "And that is the perfectest hell of it. John
Barleycorn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the amendment
to-day. I read back in my life and saw how the accessibility of alcohol
had given me the taste for it. You see, comparatively few alcoholics are
born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry
craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it. The great majority of
habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with
actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the
hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned,
just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to learn to smoke than
to learn to drink. They learned because alcohol was so accessible. The
women know the game. They pay for it--the wives and sisters and
mothers. And when they come to vote, they will vote for prohibition.
And the best of it is that there will be no hardship worked on the
coming generation. Not having access to alcohol, not being predisposed
toward alcohol, it will never miss alcohol. It will mean life more
abundant for the manhood of the young boys born and growing up--ay,
and life more abundant for the young girls born and growing up to
share the lives of the young men."
"Why not write all this up for the sake of the men and women
coming?" Charmian asked. "Why not write it so as to help the wives
and sisters and mothers to the way they should vote?"
"The 'Memoirs of an Alcoholic,'" I sneered--or, rather, John Barleycorn
sneered; for he sat with me there at table in my pleasant, philanthropic
jingle, and it is a trick of John Barleycorn to turn the smile to a sneer
without an instant's warning.
"No," said Charmian, ignoring John Barleycorn's roughness, as so
many women have learned to do. "You have shown yourself no
alcoholic, no dipsomaniac, but merely an habitual drinker, one who has
made John Barleycorn's acquaintance through long years of rubbing

shoulders with him. Write it up and call it 'Alcoholic Memoirs.'"
CHAPTER II
And, ere I begin, I must ask the reader to walk with me in all sympathy;
and, since sympathy is merely understanding, begin by understanding
me and whom and what I write about. In the first place, I am a seasoned
drinker. I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol. I am not
stupid. I am not a swine. I know the drinking game from A to Z, and I
have used my judgment in drinking. I never have to be put to bed. Nor
do I stagger. In short, I am a normal, average man; and I drink in the
normal, average way, as drinking goes. And this is the very point: I am
writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I have no
word to say