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Title: The Old Game: A Retrospect After Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon

Author: Samuel G. Blythe

Release date: July 2, 2009 [eBook #29292]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD GAME: A RETROSPECT AFTER THREE AND A HALF YEARS ON THE WATER-WAGON ***

The Old Game

A Retrospect After Three

and a Half Years on

the Water-wagon

By

Samuel G. Blythe

Author of "The Price of Place,"

"Cutting It Out," etc. etc.

New York

George H. Doran Company

COPYRIGHT, 1914

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

CONTENTS

- I.  INTRODUCTORY

- II.  A BACKWARD GLANCE FROM A HILLOCK OF ABSTINENCE

- III.  GETTING THE ALCOHOL OUT OF ONE'S SYSTEM

- IV.  THOSE WHO HAVE SUFFERED IN VAIN

- V.  A THIRSTY NATION'S NEED

- VI.  THE JEERS OF THE SMART ALECS

- VII.  MORE TIME FOR OTHER THINGS

- VIII.  LEISURE PUT TO GOOD USES

- IX.  ALCOHOL AND THE TOLL IT TAKES

I: Introductory

In a few minutes it will be three years and a half since I have taken a drink. In six years, six months, and a few minutes it will be ten years. Then I shall begin to feel I have some standing among the chaps who have quit. Three years and a half seems quite a period of abstinence to me, but I am constantly running across men who have been on the wagon for five and ten and twelve and twenty years; and I know, when it comes to merely not taking any, I am a piker as yet. However, I have well-grounded hopes. The fact is, a drink could not be put into me except with the aid of an anesthetic and a funnel; but, for all that, I am no bigot.

I look at this non-drinking determination of mine as a purely individual proposition. Let me get the stage set properly at the beginning of my remarks. I have no advice to offer and no counsel to give. Most of my best friends drink and I never have said and never shall say them nay. It is up to them—not up to me. I have no prejudices in the matter. If my friends want to drink I am for that—for them.

These things are mentioned to establish my status in the premises. I have no sermon to preach—no warning to convey. I have no desire to impress my convictions on the subject of drinking liquor on any person whatever. That is not my mission. So far as I am concerned, all persons are hereby given full and free permission to eat, drink and be merry to such extent as they may prescribe for themselves. I set no limit, suggest no reforms, urge no cutting down or cutting out. Go to it—and peace be with you! And for an absolute teetotaler I reckon I buy as many drinks for others as any one in my class.

Pardon me for inserting these puny details in what I have to say. Triflingly personal as they are they seem necessary in order to establish my viewpoint. So far as drinking is concerned I look at it with a mind that is open and tolerant—except in one instance. That one instance concerns myself personally and individually. My mind is closed and intolerant in my own case. I have quit—and quit forever; but that does not make me go round urging others to quit, or preaching at them, or trying to reform them. They can reform or not, as they dad-blamed please. To be sure I have my own interior ideas on what some of them should do; but I never have and never shall do anything with those ideas but keep them closely to myself.

Therefore, to resume: In a few minutes it will be three years and a half since I have taken a drink. There is no more alcohol in my system than there is in a glass of spring water. The thought of putting alcohol into my system is as absent from my mind as is the thought of putting benzine into it, or gasoline, or taking a swig of shoe-polish. It never occurs to me. The whole thing is out of my psychology. My palate has forgotten how it tastes. My stomach has forgotten how it feels. My head has forgotten how it exhilarates. The next-morning fur has forsaken my tongue. It is all over!

II: A Backward Glance from a Hillock of Abstinence

Looking back at the old game from this hillock of abstinence—it is not an eminence like those occupied by the twelve and fifteen year boys—looking back at the old game from this slight elevation, it is perhaps excusable for a man who put in twenty years at the old game to set the old game off against the new game and make up a debit and credit account just for the fun of it.

Just for the fun of it! My kind of drinking was always for the fun of it—for the fun that came with it and out of it and was in it—and for no other reason. I was no sot and no souse. All the drinks I took were for convivial purposes solely, except on occasional mornings when a too convivial evening demanded a next morning conniver in the way of a cocktail or a frappé, or a brandy-and-soda, for purposes of encouragement and to help get the sand out of the wheels.

Wherefore, what have I personally gained by quitting and what have I personally lost? How does the account stand? Is it worth while or not? Is there anything in convivial drinking that is too precious and too pleasant to be sacrificed for whatever pleasures or rewards there are in abstinence? What are the big equations? These are questions that naturally occur in a consideration of the subject; and these are the questions I shall try to answer, answering them entirely from my own experience and judging them from my own viewpoint, leaving the application of my conclusions to those who care to apply them to their own individual cases.

It takes two years for a man who has been a convivial drinker to get any sort of proper perspective on both sides of the proposition. Three years is better, and five years, I should say, about right. Still, after three years and a half I think I can draw some conclusions that may have a certain general application—though, as I have said, I make no pretense of applying them generally. So far as I am able to judge, a man who has been a more or less sincere drinker for twenty years does not arrive at a point before two years of abstinence where he can take an impartial and non-alcoholic survey.

At first he is imbued with the spirit of the new convert, fired with zeal and considerable of a Pharisee. Also, he is inhabited by the lingering thoughts of what he has renounced—the fun and the frolic of it; and he has set himself aside, in a good measure, from the friends he has made in the twenty years of joyousness.

III: Getting the Alcohol Out of One's System

A scientist who has made a study of the subject told me, early in my water-wagoning, that it takes eighteen months for a man to get the alcohol entirely out of his system—provided, of course, he has been a reasonably consistent consumer of it for a period of years. I think that is correct. Of course he did not mean—nor do I—that the alcohol actually remains in one's system, but that the sub-acute effects remain—that the system is not entirely reorganized on the new basis before that time; that the renovation is not complete.

I do not know exactly how to phrase it; but, as nearly as I can express it, the condition amounts to this: After a man has been a reasonably steady drinker for a period of years, and quits drinking, there remain within him mental and some physical alcoholic tendencies. These are acute for the earlier stages, and gradually come to be almost subconscious—that is, though there is no physical alcoholization of his body, the mental alcoholization has not departed. I do not mean that his mind or mental powers are in any way affected to their detriment. What I do mean is that there remains in every man a remembrance, the ghost of a desire, the haunting thoughts of how good a certain kind of a drink would taste, and a regret for joys of companionship with one's fellows in the old way and in the old game, which takes time—and a good deal of time—to eradicate.

It becomes a sort of state of mind. The body does not crave liquor. All that is past. There is no actual desire for it. Indeed, the thought of again taking a drink may be physically repugnant; but there is a sort of phantom of renounced good times that hangs round and worries and obtrudes in blue hours and lonesome hours and letdown hours—a persistent, insistent sort of ghost-thought that flits across the mind from time to time and stimulates the what's-the-use portion of a man's thinking apparatus into active, personal inquiry, based on the dum vivimus, vivamus proposition.

I know this will be disputed by many men who have quit drinking and who beat themselves on the chests and boast: "I never think of it! Never, I assure you! I quit; and after a few days the thought of drinking never entered my mind." I have only one reply for these persons; and, phrasing it as politely as I can, I say to them that they are all liars. Moreover, they are the worst sort of liars, for they not only lie to others but commit the useless folly of lying to themselves. They may think they do not lie; but they do.

There is not one of them—not one—who is not visited by the ghost of good times, the wraith of former fun, now and then; or one who does not wonder whether it is worth the struggle and speculate on what the harm would be if he took a few for old time's sake. The mental yearn comes back occasionally long after the physical yearn has vanished. My compliments to you strong-minded and iron-willed citizens who quit and forget—but you don't! You may quit, but it is months and months before you forget.

The ghost appears and reappears; but gradually, as time goes on, the visits are less frequent—and finally they cease. The ghost has given you up for a bad job. If any man has quit and has stuck it out for two years he can be reasonably sure he will not be haunted much after he enters his third year.

Mental impressions and desires last far longer than physical ones, and by that time the mind has been reorganized along the new lines. Then comes the sure knowledge that it is all right; and after that time any man who has fought his fight and falls can be classed only as an idiot. What, in the name of Bacchus, is there to compensate a man in drinking again—after he has won his fight—for all the troubles and rigors of the battle from which he has emerged victorious? If he had nerve enough to go through his novitiate and get his degree, why should he deliberately return to the position he voluntarily abandoned? What has he been fighting for? Why did he begin?

IV: Those Who Have Suffered in Vain

Owing to a worldwide acquaintance among men who drink my personal determination to quit still excites the patronizing inquiry, "Still on the wagon?" when I meet old friends. That used to make me angry, but it does not any more. I say, "Yes!" take my mineral water and pass on to other things. But the position of those who quit and go back to it, and seek to excuse the return by saying, "Oh, I only stopped to see whether I could. I found it was easy; so I began again!"—now is that not the sublimation of piffle? The fact that any man who salves himself with this sort of statement—and hundreds do—did go back does not prove that he could quit, but that he could not!

I can understand why a man, having tried both sides of the game, should conclude that the rigors and restraints of not drinking overbalance the compensations and take up the practice again; but I cannot understand why a man should be so great a hypocrite with himself as to assign a reason like that for his renewal of the habit. No man quits just to see whether he can quit. Every man quits because he personally thinks he ought to quit—for whatever his personal reason may be. And he begins again because he concludes the game is not worth playing, which means that he is not able to play it—not that it lacks merit.

When you come to sum it all up general reasons for drinking are as absurd as general reasons for not drinking. It is entirely an individual proposition. I concluded it was a bad thing for me to drink. I know now I was right. But—and here is the point—it may be a good thing for my neighbor to drink. He must judge of that himself. Personally I cannot see that it is a good thing for any man to drink; but I am no judge. I am influenced in my conclusions, not by a broad view of the situation as it applies to my fellows but by an intensely narrow view as it applies to myself. Hence what I have concluded in the matter may be uncharitable—may smack of Puritanism and may not be supported by general facts; but I am writing about my own experiences, not those of any other person whatever.

My occupation takes me to all parts of the world and has for twenty-five years. It has caused me to make friends with all sorts of people in all sorts of places and in all sorts of circumstances. I early discovered that, as I was a gregarious person and intent on doing the best for myself that I possibly could, it was necessary for me to cultivate the friendship of men of affairs; and it became apparent to me that many men of affairs take an occasional drink. Naturally I took an occasional drink with them, having no prejudices in the matter and being of open mind. I am big and husky, and mix well; and the result was I acquired as extensive a line of convivial acquaintances, across this country and across Europe, as any person of your acquaintance. To some extent my friendship with these men was predicated on having a few drinks with them. I fell in with their ways or they fell in with mine; and as my association in almost every city, among the men with whom I worked and the men I met, is based largely on entertainment of one kind or another—generally with some alcohol in it—my life was ordered that way for two decades. And I had a heap of fun. There was no sottishness about it, no solitary drinking, no drinking for drink's sake, no drunkenness. It was all jollity and really innocent enough—a case of good fellows having a good time together.

However, there was a good deal of rum consumed one way and another. Then three and a half years ago, after a long caucus with myself, I quit. I decided I had played that game long enough and would begin to play another. It may be I did not know or figure out as concretely as I have figured out since just what I was doing when I quit. It may be! Still, that has nothing to do with the case. I quit and I have stayed quit—and I have quit forever. So all that is coming to me in the premises is based on my own determination, as all has been that has come, and I have no complaints to make; and if I made any I should expect to get a punch in the eye for making them—and deserve one.

Passing over the physical and mental sides of the fight—which, I may assure you, were annoying enough to suit the most exacting advocate of the old policy of mortifying the flesh and disciplining the mind—there came eventually the necessity of learning how to keep in the game on a water basis—or, rather, of learning how to keep in such portions of the game as seemed worth while on a soft-drink schedule. I was too old to form many new ties. I had accumulated a farflung line of drinking men as friends. They were mostly the men with whom association was a pleasure—as in politics the villains are always the good fellows—and I did not want to lose them, however willing they were to lose me.

There came, however, with my mineral-water view, a discriminatory sense that was not enjoyed in the highball period—that is to say, I found, observed with the cold and mayhap critical eye of abstinence, that a number of those with whom I was wont to associate needed the softening glow radiated by the liquor in me to make them as good as I had previously thought they were. There were some I found I did not miss, and more came to the same conclusion about me. They were all right—fine!—when seen or heard through ears and eyes that had been affected by the genial charitableness of a couple or three cocktails; but when seen or heard with no adventitious appliances on my part save ginger ale they were rather depressing—and I am quite sure they held the same views about me.

V: A Thirsty Nation's Need

So I sloughed off a good many and a good many sloughed off me; and a working basis was secured. At first I tried to keep along with all the old crowd, but that was impossible in two ways. I never realized until after I was on the water-wagon what extremes in piffle I used to think was witty conversation, and they discovered speedily that my non-alcoholic communications fitted in neither with the spirit nor the spirits of the occasion.

The crying need of the society of this country is a non-alcoholic beverage that can be drunk in quantities similar to the quantities in which highballs can be drunk. A man who is a good, handy drinker can lap up half a dozen highballs in the course of an evening—and many lap up considerably more than that number and hold them comfortably; but the man does not exist who can drink half of that bulk of water or ginger ale, or of any of the first-aids-to-the-non-drinkers, and not be both flooded and foundered. The human stomach will easily accommodate numerous seidels of beer, poured in at regular or irregular intervals; but the human stomach cannot and will not take care of a similar number of seidels of water, or of any other liquid that comes in the guise of stuff that neither cheers nor inebriates. I have never looked up the scientific reason for this. I state it as a fact, proved by my own attempts to accomplish with water what I used easily to do with highballs, Pilsner and other naughty substances.

The reformer boys will tell you there is no special need for such a drink; that water is all-sufficient. Of course everybody knows the reformer boys think the world is going to hell in a hanging basket unless each person in it comports himself and herself as the reformer boy dictates! But it is not so. And it is so that the social intercourse, the interchange of ideas between man and man, both in this country and in every other country, is often predicated on drinking as a concomitant.

We may bewail this, but we cannot dodge it. Hence any man who has been used to the normal society of his fellows along the lines by which I became used to that society, and along the lines by which ninety per cent of the men in this country become used to that society, must make a bluff at drinking something now and then. If he is not a partaker of alcohol he has his troubles in finding a medium for his imbibing, unless he goes the entire limit and cuts out the society of all friends who drink, which leaves him in a rather sequestrated and senseless position—not, of course, that there are not plenty of interesting men who do not drink, but that so many interesting men do.

So the problem of a non-drinker resolves itself to this: How can he continue in the companionship of the men he likes, and who possibly like him, and not drink? How can he remain a social animal, with the fellowship of his kind, and stay on the water-wagon? Well, it is a difficult problem, especially for persons situated as I was, who had spent twenty years accumulating a large assortment of acquaintances who used the stuff in moderation, but with added social zest to their goings and comings.

When a man first stops drinking he is likely to become censorious. That starts him badly. Also he is likely to become serious. That marks him down fifteen points out of a possible thirty. He flocks by himself, thinking high thoughts about his purity of purpose, his vast wisdom, his acute realization of the dangers that formerly beset his path and now beset the path of all those who are not walking side by side and in close communion with him. He pins medals all over himself, pats himself on the chest, and is much better than his kind.

Then he wakes up—unless he is a chump and a Pharisee. If he is one or both of those he never wakes up, but soon passes beyond the pale. When he wakes up—assuming he has intelligence enough to do that—he gets an acute realization that if he holds off in that manner much longer even the elevator boys will not speak to him; and he comes to a point where he finds out that the wisest of the wise saws is that a man who is in Rome should do as the Romans do, with such modifications as his personal circumstances may demand. Personally I found the most advantageous course to pursue was to drop the highfalutin air of extreme virtue that oppressed me and depressed my friends for the first few months and consider the whole thing as a joke.

VI: The Jeers of the Smart Alecs

I refused to take it seriously. It was in reality the most serious thing in the world; but that was inside. Outside it was a thing to josh, to laugh over, to stand chaffing about—I listened to interminable comments, all couched in the same form—but, nevertheless, a thing to be held to grimly and firmly. So I went along whenever I had a chance. After the ghosts ceased haunting and the desire had gone I found I could cheer up on skillfully absorbed mineral water. I am free to say that a good deal of the conversation I heard bored me a heap; but I did not let on. And the result has been that I am no longer forced to flock by myself, but can break into almost any company of good fellows and be as good a fellow as any of them, via the ginger-ale or mineral-water process of conviviality.

All the asses are not solidungulate quadrupeds—a good many of them belong to the genus homo. These are found in every center of population and are the boys who never cease wondering how it is that any man can or does do anything they themselves do not do, and continually comment thereon. Ordinarily when a man of my type quits drinking the fact is accepted after the probationary period has passed, and no further comment is made on it. Not so with the asinine contingent. They have the same patter to prattle unceasingly about it. They have the same comment, the same bromides to get off, the same sneers to sneer and the same jeers to jeer. If there was no other reason—and there are a hundred—why I shall not do any more drinking, I shall never taste another drop just to show these fools what fools they are when they run up against a real determination.

It took time to get into this water-cheerful stage—a good deal of time, a good deal of determination, a good deal of maneuvering; and it meant the overlooking of many things that did not appeal to me, as well as considerable charity on the part of the folks with whom I desired to remain friendly—more on their part than on mine, I am sure.

However, it has worked out reasonably well; and as I have tried it in New York, in Washington, in San Francisco and Boston, and in most cities between, in London and Paris and Berlin, and in other portions of the globe where I formerly performed under the other schedule, I think I am safe in saying that it can be done if one sets his mind to it—that is, a non-drinker need not necessarily be a hermit. Of course he can find plenty of non-drinkers with whom to associate if he makes the search; but, and it saddens me to say it, many of the non-drinking classes are not so interesting as they might be.

However, that is only one phase of it—an important phase, but not the only one. Doubtless it will seem erroneous to many persons, who have not been accustomed to the sort of relaxation that full-lived men take, to say this is important; and I freely admit that the highbrow basis is somewhat different from the highball basis.

I grant that seekers after conversation about dull and academic subjects may not find that conversation at a social gathering sought for relaxation after the day's work is over; but not all conversation of the kind most red-blooded and live men who do things crave consists of joining in barber-shop chords of: "How dry I am! How dry I am! Nobudee knows how dry I am!"

VII: More Time for Other Things

And there is this great advantage: Your resources for the entertainment of yourself are vastly developed when you do not drink. When you do drink, about all you do is drink—that is, the usual formula, day by day, is to get through work and then go somewhere where there are fellows of your kind and have a few. Now when you do not drink you find there are other things that occur to you as worth while. It is not necessary to hurry to the club or elsewhere to meet the crowd and listen to the newest story, or hear the comment on the day's doings, punctuated by the regular tapping of the bell for the waiter and the pleasing: "What'll it be, boys?" You do that now and then, but you do not do it every day.

After mature consideration of the subject I have concluded that the greatest, the most satisfactory, the finest attribute of a non-alcoholic life is the time it gives you to do non-alcoholic things. Time! That is the largest benefit—time to read, to think, to get out-of-doors, to see pictures, to go to plays, to meet and mingle with new people, to do your own work in. A man who has the convivial-drinking habit is put to it on occasions to find time for anything but conviviality aside from his regular occupation. It seems imperative to him that he shall get where the crowd is, and stay there. He might miss something—a drink maybe, or two, or a laugh, or a yarn, or the pleasures of association with folks he likes. These are important when visualized alcoholically. They make up the most of that kind of a life.

Do not understand that I am deprecating these pleasures. I am not. I have already explained how strenuously I worked out a program that enables me to enjoy them now and then; but the fact that I have quit drinking makes them incidental to the general scheme instead of the whole scheme. It gives me an opportunity to pick and choose a bit. It relieves me of the necessity of being at the same places at the same time every afternoon or evening. Whereas I used to be the boss and John Barleycorn the foreman, I have now discharged John and am both boss and foreman; and I run the game to suit myself and have time for other things.

Let me impress that on you—the glory and gladness of time! It requires rather persistent application to be a good fellow. One cannot do much else. However, when a man has arrived at that stage where he can retain at least a portion of his good fellowship and also can be two or three of the other kinds of a worth-while fellow—to himself, at least—he has gained on the old gang by about a hundred per cent.

As it is now, no chums come shouting in to urge me to go and have one; nobody drops round at five o'clock in the afternoon to hurry me along to the favorite table at the club; nobody suggests about seven o'clock that we all 'phone home and stay down and have dinner together; the old plan of having a luncheon that lasts an hour and a half or two hours in the best part of the day is rarely broached. There are few telephone calls after dinner urging an immediate descent on a gathering where there is something coming off—all these things are left to my choice and are not taken as a matter of usual procedure, predicated on the circumstances of the plan of living.

A non-drinking man is the master of his own time. If he wants sociability he can go and get it, up to such limits as he personally can attain for himself in his water-consuming capacity. A drinking man is not master of his time. He may think he is, but he is not. He is the creature of a habit that may be harmless, but which surely is insistent; and the habit dictates what he shall do with his leisure.

Time! Why, such new vistas of what can be done with time that was wasted in former years have opened before me that time seems to me the greatest luxury in the world—time that was formerly wasted and now is used! I hope that does not sound priggish. I have tried to show that I value highly the privilege of associating with my fellows, and that I like their ways and their talk and their company. What I mean by this pæan to time is that I can have company in a modified measure, if I choose; and that I can and do have other things that no man who has a daily drinking habit can or does have.

VIII: Leisure Put to Good Uses

Take books—though books may not be a fair test of time employed in my case, for I always have read books in great numbers—but take books: In the past three years and a half I have read as many books—real books—as I read in the ten years preceding. I have read books I was always intending to read, but never got round to. I have kept up with the new good ones and have helped myself to several items of interesting discovery and knowledge that in the old days would have been known about only through newspaper reports. I have developed a good many half-facts that were in my mind. I have classified and arranged a lot of scattering information that had seeped into me notwithstanding my engagements with the boys.

I have had time to go to see some pictures. I have had time to hear some music. I have had time to visit a lot of interesting places, such as great industrial concerns and factories, which I always intended to see but never quite reached. I have had time to make a few investigations on my own account. I have met and talked to a large number of people who were formerly outside my range of vision. And I have done better work in my own line—I have more time for it.

If I have lost any friends they were friends whose loss does not bother me. I find that all the true-blue chaps, the worth-while ones, though they look—in most instances—on my non-drinking idiosyncrasy with amused tolerance, have not lost any respect or affection for me, and are just as true blue as they formerly were. Most of them drink, but I fancy some of them wish they did not; and none of them holds my strange behavior up against me.

To be sure, they often have their little gatherings without me; but that is not because they do not like me any the less, and is because I do not happen, in my new rôle, to fit in. There are times, you know, when even the most enthusiastic ginger-ale specialist is not persona grata. We have reached a common basis of understanding. The real man is tolerant. Intolerance is the vice of the narrow man.

Now, then, we come to the real question, which is: With our society organized as it is, with men such men as they are, with conditions that surround life as it is organized, with things as they stand to-day—is it worth while to drink moderately, or is it not? The answer, based solely on my own experience, is that it is not. Looking at the matter from all its angles I am convinced that the best thing I ever did for myself was to quit drinking. I will go further than that and say it is my unalterable conviction that alcohol, in any form, as a beverage never did anything for any man that he would not have been better without.

I can now sit back and contrast the old game with the new. The comparisons fall under two general heads—physical and mental. The physical gain is so obvious that even those who have not experienced it admit it, and those who have experienced it comment on it as some miracle of health that has been attained. Any man—I do not care who he is—who was the sort of a drinker I was, who will stop drinking long enough to get cooled out will feel so much better in every way that he will be hard put to it to give a reason for ever beginning again.

Take my own case: I was fat, wheezy, uric-acidy, gouty, rheumatic—not organically bad, but symptomatically inferior. I was never quite normal—no man is normal who has a few drinks each day, though most men boast they never were under the influence of liquor in their lives, and all that sort of tommyrot—and never quite up to the mark.

Now I weigh one hundred eighty-five pounds, which is my normal weight, for that is what I weighed when I was twenty-one; and I have not varied five pounds in more than two years. I used to weigh two hundred and fifty, which was the result of our friend Pilsner beer and his accomplices. All the gouty, rheumatic, wheezy symptoms are gone. If there is anything the matter with me the best doctors in these United States cannot discover what it is. My eye is clear, instead of somewhat bleary. I have dropped off every physical burden and infirmity I had, and I am in the pink of condition. I have no fear of heart, kidneys, or of any other organ. I have no pains, no aches, and no head in the morning. I sleep as a well man should sleep and I eat as a well man should eat. I am forty-five years old and I feel as if I were twenty—and I am, to all intents and purposes, physically.

So much for that side of it. Mentally I have a clearer, saner, wider view of life. I am afflicted by none of the desultoriness superinduced by alcohol. I do not need a bracer to get me going or a hooker to keep me under way. I find, now that I know the other side of it, that the chief mental effect of alcohol, taken as I took it, is to induce a certain scattering and casualness of mind. Also, it induces a lack of definiteness of view and a notable failure of intensive effort. A man evades and scatters and exaggerates and makes loose statements when he drinks.

IX: Alcohol and the Toll it Takes

And let me say another thing: One of the reasons I quit was because I noticed I was going to funerals oftener than usual—funerals of friends who had been living the same sort of lives for theirs as I had been living for mine. They began dropping off with Bright's disease and other affections superinduced by alcohol; and I took stock of that feature of it rather earnestly. The funerals have not stopped. They have been more frequent in the past three years than in the three years preceding—all good fellows, happy, convivial souls; but now dead. Some of them thought that I was foolish to quit too!

And there are a few cases of hardening arteries I know about, and a considerable amount of gout and rheumatism, and some other ills, among the gay boys who japed at me for quitting. Gruesome, is it not? And God forbid that I should cast up! But if you quit it in time there will be no production of albumin and sugar, no high blood pressure, no swollen big toes and stiffened joints.

If health is a desideratum, one way to attain a lot of it is to cut out the booze. The old game makes for fun, but it takes toll—and never fails!

I have tried it both ways. I can see how a man who never took any liquor cannot understand much of what I have written, and I can see how a man who has the same sort of habits I had can think me absurd in my conclusions; but a man who has played both ends of it certainly has some qualifications as a judge. And, as I stated, I have set down here only my own personal ideas on the subject.

As I look at it there is no argument. The man who does not drink has all the better of the game.

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Table of Contents

The Old Game

A Retrospect After Three and a Half Years on the Water-wagon By

Samuel G. Blythe

Author of "The Price of Place," "Cutting It Out," etc. etc.

New York George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1914 By George H. Doran Company

CONTENTS

I: Introductory

II: A Backward Glance from a Hillock of Abstinence

III: Getting the Alcohol Out of One's System

IV: Those Who Have Suffered in Vain

V: A Thirsty Nation's Need

VI: The Jeers of the Smart Alecs

VII: More Time for Other Things

VIII: Leisure Put to Good Uses

IX: Alcohol and the Toll it Takes

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