The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions | Page 7

of constant dream from which no one ever saw him wake.
These once bright and splendid intellectual beings swarm in the houses
of poverty: if you pick up with a peculiarly degraded one you may
always be sure that he was one of the best men of his time, and it seems
as if the very rich quality of his intelligence had enabled corruption to
rankle through him so much the more quickly. I have seen a tramp on
the road--a queer, long-nosed, short-sighted animal--who would read
Greek with the book upside-down. He was a very fine Latin scholar,
and we tried him with Virgil; he could go off at score when he had a
single line given him, and he scarcely made a slip, for the poetry
seemed ingrained. I have shared a pennyworth of sausage with the
brother of a Chief Justice, and I have played a piccolo while an
ex-incumbent performed a dance which he described, I think, as
Pyrrhic. He fell in the fire and used hideous language in Latin and
French, but I do not know whether that was Pyrrhic also. Drink is the
dainty harvester; no puny ears for him, no faint and bending stalks: he
reaps the rathe corn, and there is only the choicest of the choice in his
sheaves. That is what I want to fix on the minds of young people--and
others; the more sense of power you have, the more pride of strength
you have, the more you are likely to be marked and shorn down by the
grim reaper; and there is little hope for you when the reaper once
approaches, because the very friends who followed the national craze,
and upheld the harmlessness of drink, will shoot out their lips at you
and run away when your bad moment comes.
The last person who ever suspects that a wife drinks is always the
husband; the last person who ever suspects that any given man is bitten
with drink is that man himself. So stealthily, so softly does the evil
wind itself around a man's being, that he very often goes on fancying
himself a rather admirable and temperate customer--until the crash
comes. It is all so easy, that the deluded dupe never thinks that anything
is far wrong until he finds that his friends are somehow beginning to
fight shy of him. No one will tell him what ails him, and I may say that

such a course would be quite useless, for the person warned would
surely fly into a passion, declare himself insulted, and probably
perform some mad trick while his nerves were on edge. Well, there
comes a time when the doomed man is disinclined for exertion, and he
knows that something is wrong. He has become sly almost without
knowing it, and, although he is pining for some stimulus, he pretends to
go without, and tries by the flimsiest of devices, to deceive those
around him. Now that is a funny symptom; the master vice, the vice
that is the pillar of the revenue, always, without any exception known
to me, turns a man into a sneak, and it generally turns him into a liar as
well. So sure as the habit of concealment sets in, so surely we may be
certain that the dry-rot of the soul has begun. The drinker is tremulous;
he finds that light beverages are useless to him, and he tries something
that burns: his nerve recovers tone; he laughs at himself for his early
morning fears, and he gets over another day. But the dry-rot is
spreading; body and soul react on each other, and the forlorn one soon
begins to be fatally false and weak in morals, and dirty and slovenly in
person. Then in the dead, unhappy nights he suffers all the torments
that can be endured if he wakes up while his day's supply of alcohol
lies stagnant in his system. No imagination is so retrospective as the
drunkard's, and the drunkard's remorse is the most terrible torture
known. The wind cries in the dark and the trees moan; the agonized
man who lies waiting the morning thinks of the times when the whistle
of the wind was the gladdest of sounds to him; his old ambitions wake
from their trance and come to gaze on him reproachfully; he sees that
fortune (and mayhap fame) have passed him by, and all through his
own fault; he may whine about imaginary wrongs during the day when
he is maudlin, but the night fairly throttles him if he attempts to turn
away from the stark truth, and he remains pinned face to face with his
beautiful, dead self. Then, with a start, he remembers that he has no
friends. When he crawls out in the morning to