To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a man's secret when it is shared with John Barleycorn. And the reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the moods of John Barleycorn, and that the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many a day and week and month.
My reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the planet is my unmerited luck—the luck of chest, and shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. I survived, through no personal , but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I an organism unusually to the of John Barleycorn. And, surviving, I have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all the long sad road.
It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the fires of John Barleycorn. My life, my career, my joy in living, have not been destroyed. They have been , it is true; like the of forlorn hopes, they have by unthinkably ways come through the fight to at the of the .
And like such a of old red war who cries out, "Let there be no more war!" so I cry out, "Let there be no more poison-fighting by our youths!" The way to stop war is to stop it. The way to stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped the general use of was by stopping the and importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as opium was ever accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated. We are so made, that is all.
We have with great success made a practice of not leaving and strychnine, and typhoid and germs lying around for our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barleycorn the same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, and legal, to
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