I had been drinking thus for practically twenty years. I did not drink at all until after I was twenty-one and not much until after I was twenty-five. When I got to be thirty-two or thirty-three and had gone along a little in the world, I fell in with men of my own station; and as I lived in a town where nearly everybody drank, including many of the successful business and professional men men of affairs I soon got into their habits. Naturally gregarious, I found these men good company. They were sociable and convivial, and drank for the fun of it and the fun that came out of it.

My business took me to various parts of the country and I made acquaintances among men like these the real live ones in the communities. They were good fellows. So was I. The result was that in a few years I had a list of friends from California to Maine all of whom drank; and I was never at a loss for company or highballs. Then I moved to a city where there isn’t much of anything else to do but drink at certain times in the day, a city where men from all parts of the country congregate and where the social side of life is highly accentuated. I kept along with the procession. I did my work satisfactorily to my employers and I did my drinking satisfactorily to myself.

This continued for several years. I had a fixed habit. I drank several drinks each day. Sometimes I drank more than several. My system was organized to digest about so much alcohol every twenty-four hours. So far as I could see, the drinking did me no harm. I was well. My appetite was good. I slept soundly. My head was clear. My work proceeded easily and was getting fair recognition. Then some of the boys began dropping off and some began breaking down. I had occasional mornings, after big dinners or specially convivial affairs, when I did not feel very well when I was out of tune and knew why. Still, I continued as of old, and thought nothing of it except as the regular katzenjammer to be expected.

Presently I woke up to what was happening round me. I looked the game over critically. I analyzed it coldly and calmly. I put every advantage of my mode of life on one side and every disadvantage; and I put on the other side every disadvantage of a change in procedure and every advantage. There were times when I thought the present mode had by far the better of it, and times when the change contemplated outweighed the other heavily.

Here is the way it totted up against quitting: Practically every friend you have in the United States and you’ve got a lot of them drinks more or less. You have not cultivated any other line of associates. If you quit drinking, you will necessarily have to quit a lot of these friends, and quit their parties and company for a man who doesn’t drink is always a death’s-head at a feast or merrymaking where drinking is going on. Your social intercourse with these people is predicated on taking an occasional drink, in going to places where drinks are served, both public and at homes. The kind of drinking you do makes greatly for sociability, and you are a sociable person and like to be round with congenial people. You will miss a lot of fun, a lot of good, clever companionship, for you are too old to form a new line of friends. Your whole game is organized along these lines. Why make a hermit of yourself just because you think drinking may harm you? Cut it down. Take care of yourself. Don’t be such a fool as to try to change your manner of living just when you have an opportunity to live as you should and enjoy what is coming to you.

This is the way it lined up for quitting: So far, liquor hasn’t done anything to you except cause you to waste some time that might have been otherwise employed; but it will get you, just as it has landed a lot of your friends, if you stay by it. Wouldn’t it be better to miss some of this stuff you have come to think of as fun, and live longer? There is no novelty in drinking to you. You haven’t an appetite that cannot be checked, but you will have if you stick to it much longer. Why not quit and take a chance at a new mode of living, especially when you know absolutely that every health reason, every future-prospect reason, every atom of good sense in you, tells you there is nothing to be gained by keeping at it, and that all may be lost?

Well, I pondered over that a long time. I had watched miserable wretches who had struggled to stay on the waterwagon sometimes with amusement. I knew what they had to stand if they tried to associate with their former companions; I knew the apparent difficulties and the disadvantages of this new mode of life. On the other hand, I was convinced that, so far as I was concerned, without trying to lay down a rule for any other man, I would be an ass if I didn’t quit it immediately, while I was well and all right, instead of waiting until I had to quit on a doctor’s orders, or got to that stage when I couldn’t quit.

It was no easy thing to make the decision. It is hard to change the habits and associations of twenty years! I had a good understanding of myself. I was no hero. I liked the fun of it, the companionship of it, better than any one. I like my friends and, I hope and think, they like me. It seemed to me that I needed it in my business, for I was always dealing with men who did drink.

I wrestled with it for some weeks. I thought it all out, up one side and down the other. Then I quit. Also I stayed quit. And believe me, ladies and gentlemen and all others present, it was no fool of a job.

I have learned many things since I went on the waterwagon for fair many things about my fellowmen and many things about myself. Most of these things radiate round the innate hypocrisy of the human being. All those that do not concern his hypocrisy concern his lying which, I reckon, when you come to stack them up together, amounts to the same thing. I have learned that I had been fooling myself and that others had been fooling me. I gathered experience every day. And some of the things I have learned I shall set down.

You have all known the man who says he quit drinking and never thought of drink again. He is a liar. He doesn’t exist. No man in this world who had a daily habit of drinking ever quit and never thought of drinking again. Many men, because they habitually lie to themselves, think they have done this; but they haven’t. The fact is, no man with a daily habit of drinking ever quit and thought of anything else than how good a drink would taste and feel for a time after he quit. He couldn’t and he didn’t. I don’t care what any of them say. I know.

Further, the man who tells you he never takes a drink until five o’clock in the afternoon, or three o’clock in the afternoon, or only drinks with his meals, or only takes two or three drinks a day, usually is a liar, too not always, but usually. There are some machine-like, non-imaginative persons who can do this drink by rote or by rule; but not many. Now I do not say many men do not think they drink this way, but most of these men are simply fooling themselves.

Again, this proposition of cutting down drinks to two or three a day is all rot. Of what use to any person are two or three drinks a day? I mean to any person who drinks for the fun of it, as I did and as most of my friends do yet. What kind of a human being is he who comes into a club and takes one cocktail and no more? or one highball? He’s worse, from any view-point of sociability, than a man who drinks a glass of water. At least the man who drinks the water isn’t fooling himself or trying to be part one thing and part another. The way to quit drinking is to quit drinking. That is all there is to that. This paltering along with two or three drinks a day is mere cowardice. It is neither one thing nor the other. And I am here to say, also, that nine out of every ten men who say they only take two or three drinks a day are liars, just the same as the men who say they quit and never think of it again. They may not think they are liars, or intend to be liars; but they are liars just the same.

Well, as I may have intimated, I quit drinking. I drank that last, lingering Scotch highball and quit! I decided the no-liquor end of it was the better end, and I took that end.