The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions | Page 7

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 steady his hand he will be greeted with filthy public-house cordiality by the animals