This took some time. I didn’t dash into it. I had done that before, and had dashed out again just as impetuously. I revolved the matter in my mind for some weeks. Then I decided to quit. Then I did quit. Thereby hangs this tale.

I went to a dinner one night that was a good dinner. It was a dinner that had every appurtenance that a good dinner should have, including the best things to drink that could be obtained, and lashings of them. I proceeded at that dinner just as I had proceeded at scores of similar dinners in my time hundreds of them, I guess and took a drink every time anybody else did. I was a seasoned drinker. I knew how to do it. I went home that night pleasantly jingled, but no more. I slept well, ate a good breakfast and went down to business. On the way down I decided that this was the day to make the plunge. Having arrived at that decision, I went out about three o’clock that afternoon, drank a Scotch highball a big, man’s-sized one as a doch-an-doris, and quit. That was almost a year ago. I haven’t taken a drink since. It is not my present intention ever to take another drink; but I am not tying myself down by any vows. It is not my present intention, I say; and I let it go at that.

No man can be blamed for trying to fool other people about himself that is the way most of us get past; but what can be said for a man who tries to fool himself? Every man knows exactly how bogus he is and should admit it to himself only. The man who, knowing his bogusness, refuses to admit it to himself no matter what his attitude may be to the outside world simply stores up trouble for himself, and discomfort and much else. There are many phases of personal understanding of oneself that need not be put in the newspapers or proclaimed publicly. Still, for a man to gold-brick himself is a profitless undertaking, but prevalent notwithstanding.

When it comes to fooling oneself by oneself, the grandest performers are the boys who have a habit no matter what kind of a habit a habit! It may be smoking cigarettes, or walking pigeontoed, or talking through the nose, or drinking or anything else. Any man can see with half an eye how drinking, for example, is hurting Jones; but he always argues that his own personal drinking is of a different variety and is doing him no harm. The best illustration of it is in the old vaudeville story, where the man came on the stage and said: “Smith is drinking too much! I never go into a saloon without finding him there!”

That is the reason drinking liquor gets so many people either by wrecking their health or by fastening on them the habit they cannot stop. They fool themselves. They are perfectly well aware that their neighbors are drinking too much but not themselves. Far be it from them not to have the will-power to stop when it is time to stop. They are smarter than their neighbors. They know what they are doing. And suddenly the explosions come!

There are hundreds of thousands of men in all walks of life in this country who for twenty or thirty years have never lived a minute when there was not more or less alcohol in their systems, who cannot be said to have been strictly and entirely sober in all that time, but who do their work, perform all their social duties, make their careers and are fairly successful just the same.

There has been more flub-dub printed and spoken about drinking liquor than about any other employment, avocation, vocation, habit, practice or pleasure of mankind. Drinking liquor is a personal proposition, and nothing else. It is individual in every human relation. Still, you cannot make the reformers see that. They want other people to stop drinking because they want other people to stop. So they make laws that are violated, and get pledges that are broken and try to legislate or preach or coax or scare away a habit that must, in any successful outcome, be stopped by the individual, and not because of any law or threat or terror or cajolery.

This is the human-nature side of it, but the professional reformers know less about human nature, and care less, than about any other phase of life. Still, the fact remains that with any habit, and especially with the liquor habit probably because that is the most prevalent habit there is nine-tenths of the subjects delude themselves about how much of a habit they have; and, second, that nine-tenths of those with the habit have a very clear idea of the extent to which the habit is fastened on others. They are fooled about themselves, but never about their neighbors! Wherefore the breweries and the distilleries prosper exceedingly.

However, I am straying away from my story, which has to do with such drinking as the ordinary man does not sprees, nor debauches, or orgies, or periodicals, or drunkenness, but just the ordinary amount of drinking that happens along in a man’s life, with a little too much on rare occasions and plenty at all times. A German I knew once told me the difference between Old-World drinking and American drinking was that the German, for example, drinks for the pleasure of the drink, while the American drinks for the alcohol in it. That may be so; but very few men who have any sense or any age set out deliberately to get drunk. Such drunkenness as there is among men of that sort usually comes more by accident than by design.

My definition of a drunkard has always been this: A man is a drunkard when he drinks whisky or any other liquor before breakfast. I think that is pretty nearly right. Personally I never took a drink of liquor before breakfast in my life and not many before noon. Usually my drinking began in the afternoon after business, and was likely to end before dinnertime not always, but usually.