First off, let me state the object of the meeting: This is to be a record of sundry experiences centering round a stern resolve to get on the waterwagon and a sterner attempt to stay there. It is an entirely personal narrative of a strictly personal set of circumstances. It is not a temperance lecture, or a temperance tract, or a chunk of advice, or a shuddering recital of the woes of a horrible example, or a warning, or an admonition or anything at all but a plain tale of an adventure that started out rather vaguely and wound up rather satisfactorily.

I am no brand that was snatched from the burning; no sot who picked himself or was picked from the gutter; no drunkard who almost wrecked a promising career; no constitutional or congenital souse. I drank liquor the same way hundreds of thousands of men drink it drank liquor and attended to my business, and got along well, and kept my health, and provided for my family, and maintained my position in the community. I felt I had a perfect right to drink liquor just as I had a perfect right to stop drinking it. I never considered my drinking in any way immoral.

I was decent, respectable, a gentleman, who drank only with gentlemen and as a gentleman should drink if he pleases. I didn’t care whether any one else drank and do not now. I didn’t care whether any one else cared whether I drank and do not now. I am no reformer, no lecturer, no preacher. I quit because I wanted to, not because I had to. I didn’t swear off, nor take any vow, nor sign any pledge. I am no moral censor. It is even possible that I might go out this afternoon and take a drink. I am quite sure I shall not but I might. As far as my trip into Teetotal Land is concerned, it is an individual proposition and nothing else. I am no example for other men who drink as much as I did, or more, or less but I assume my experiences are somewhat typical, for I am sure my drinking was very typical; and a recital of those experiences and the conclusions thereon is what is before the house.

I quit drinking because I quit drinking. I had a very fair batting average in the Booze League as good as I thought necessary; and I knew if I stopped when my record was good the situation would be satisfactory to me, whether it was to any other person or not. Moreover, I figured it out that the time to stop drinking was when it wasn’t necessary to stop not when it was necessary. I had been observing during the twenty years I had been drinking, more or less, and I had known a good many men who stopped drinking when the doctors told them to. Furthermore, it had been my observation that when a doctor tells a man to stop drinking it usually doesn’t make much difference whether he stops or not. In a good many cases he might just as well keep on and die happily, for he’s going to die anyhow; and the few months he will grab through his abstinence will not amount to anything when the miseries of that abstinence are duly chalked up in the debit column.

Therefore, applying the cold, hard logic of the situation to it, I decided to beat the liquor to it.

That was the reason for stopping purely selfish, personal, individual, and not concerned with the welfare of any other person on earth just myself. I had taken good care of myself physically and I knew I was sound everywhere. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep sound and continue drinking. So I decided to stop drinking and keep sound. I noticed that a good many men of the same age as myself and the same habits as myself were beginning to show signs of wear and tear. A number of them blew up with various disconcerting maladies and a number more died. Soon after I was forty years of age I noticed I began to go to funerals oftener than I had been doing funerals of men between forty and forty-five I had known socially and convivially; that these funerals occurred quite regularly, and that the doctor’s certificate, more times than not, gave Bright’s Disease and other similar diseases in the cause-of-death column. All of these funerals were of men who were good fellows, and we mourned their loss. Also we generally took a few drinks to their memories.

Then came a time when this funeral business landed on me like a pile-driver. Inside of a year four or five of the men I had known best, the men I had loved best, the men who had been my real friends and my companions, died, one after another. Also some other friends developed physical dérangements I knew were directly traceable to too much liquor. Both the deaths and the dérangements had liquor as a contributing if not as a direct cause. Nobody said that, of course; but I knew it.

So I held a caucus with myself. I called myself into convention and discussed the proposition somewhat like this:

“You are now over forty years of age. You are sound physically and you are no weaker mentally than you have always been, so far as can be discovered by the outside world. You have had a lot of fun, much of it complicated with the conviviality that comes with drinking and much of it not so complicated; but you have done your share of plain and fancy drinking, and it hasn’t landed you yet. There is absolutely no nutriment in being dead. That gets you nothing save a few obituary notices you will never see. There is even less in being sick and sidling around in everybody’s way. It’s as sure as sunset, if you keep on at your present gait, that Mr. John Barleycorn will land you just as he has landed a lot of other people you know and knew. There are two methods of procedure open to you. One is to keep it up and continue having the fun you think you are having and take what is inevitably coming to you. The other is to quit it while the quitting is good and live a few more years that may not be so rosy, but probably will have compensations.”

I viewed it from every angle I could think of. I knew what sort of a job I had laid out to tackle if I quit. I weighed the whole thing in my mind in the light of my acquaintances, my experiences, my position, my mode of life, my business. I had been through it many times. I had often gone on the waterwagon for periods varying in length from three days to three months. I wasn’t venturing into any uncharted territory. I knew every signpost, every crossroad, every foot of the ground. I knew the difficulties knew them by heart. I wasn’t deluding myself with any assertions of superior will-power or superior courage or superior anything. I knew I had a fixed daily habit of drinking, and that if I quit drinking I should have to reorganize the entire works.