He has a little false strength of mind and brain and that strength is used to mumble good resolutions.
He THINKS he will stop drinking. He thinks he could easily get money backing if he gave up drinking for good. He feels and really believes that he WILL stop drinking.
Perhaps he goes home, and for the hundredth time makes a poor woman believe him, and makes her weep once more for joy, as she has wept many times from sorrow.
But the bartender KNOWS that that man"s day has gone, and that Niagara River could turn back as easily as he could remount the swift stream that is sweeping him to destruction. ----
Five men come in together. Each asks of all the others:
"What are you going to have?"
The bartender spreads out his hands on the edge of the bar, attentive and prepared to work quickly.
Every man insists on "buying" something to drink in his turn.
Each takes what the others insist on giving him.
Each thinks that he is hospitable.
But the bartender KNOWS that those men belong to the Great American a.s.sociation for the Manufacture of Drunkards through "treating."
Each of those men might perhaps take his gla.s.s of beer, or even something worse, with relative safety. But, as stupidly as stampeded animals pushing each other over a precipice, each insists on buying poison in his turn. And every one spends his money to make every other one, if possible, a hard-drinking and a wasted man. ----
You, Sir. Reader, have seen all these types and many others, have you not?
WHY did you see them? What REASON had you for seeing them?
The bartender stands studying the procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of clean-ap.r.o.ned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the mult.i.tude to perdition on the other side of the river. But what is YOUR business there?
You might as well be found inside an opium den.
The drink swallowed at the bar braces you, does it? If you think you need a drink, you REALLY need sleep, or better nourishment, or you need to live more sensibly. Drink will not give you what you need. It may for a moment make your nerves cease tormenting you. It may do in your system for an hour what opium does in the Chinese for a whole day. But if it lifts you up high, it drops you down HARD.
And remember:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MODERATE DRINKING AT A BAR.
You THINK you can take your occasional drink safely and philosophize about the procession that pa.s.ses the bartender.
But the bartender KNOWS that you are no different from the others. They all began as you are beginning. They all, in the early stages, despised their own forerunners.
They were once as you are, and the bartender KNOWS that the chances are all in favor of your being eventually like one of them.
Even like the poor, thin, nervous drinker of hard whiskey, who once wondered why men drink too much. ----
The bartender"s procession is a sad one, and you who still think yourself safe are the saddest atom in the line, for you are there without sufficient excuse.
It is a long procession, and its end is far off.
It is born of the fact that life is dull, compet.i.tion is keen, and ambition so often ends in sawdust failure.
A better chance for strugglers, a more generous reward for hard work, better organization of social life, solution of the great unsolved problem of real civilization, will end the bartender"s procession.
Meanwhile, keep out of it if you can. And be glad if it can be suspended, temporarily at least, on Sundays.
WHAT SHOULD BE A MAN"S OBJECT IN LIFE?
Sermons in stones are familiar, but few take the trouble to dig them out. Certainly none looks for sermons in a one-cent evening newspaper.
At the same time, will you kindly think over and answer the question that heads this column?
Here we are, marooned for a few days on a flying ball of earth.
We don"t know how we got here. We don"t know where we are going.
We are full of beautiful and satisfying FAITH. But we don"t KNOW.
Into this Universe, and WHY not knowing, Nor WHENCE, like Water, w.i.l.l.y-nilly flowing; And out of it as Wind along the Waste, I know not WHITHER, w.i.l.l.y-nilly blowing.
That"s the way Omar, the old tent-maker, puts it. ----
We drift from dinner to the theatre, thence to bed, thence to breakfast, thence to work, and so on. Or, if in hard luck, we struggle and wail, "cursing our day," or more frequently cursing society.
We rarely stop to think what it is all about, or what we are here for. ----
We know the pig"s object in life. It has been beautifully and permanently outlined in Carlyle"s "pig catechism." The pig"s life object is to get fat and keep fat--to get his full share of swill and as much more as he can manage to secure. And his life object is worthy. By sticking at it he develops fat hams inside his bristles, and WE know, though he does not, that the production of fat hams is his destiny. ----
But our human destiny is NOT to produce fat hams. Why do so many of us live earnestly on the pig basis? Why do we struggle savagely for money to buy our kind of swill--luxury, food, etc.
--and cease all struggling when that money is obtained?
Is fear of poverty and dependence the only emotion that should move us?
Are we here merely to STAY here and EAT here?
A great German scientist, very learned and about as imaginative as a wart hog, declares that the human face is merely an extension and elaboration of the alimentary ca.n.a.l--that the beauty of expression, the marvellous qualities of a n.o.ble human face, are merely indirect results of the alimentary ca.n.a.l"s strivings to satisfy its wants.
That is a hideous conception, is it not? But it is no more unworthy than the average human life, and the average existence has much to justify the German"s speculations.
What SHALL we strive for? MONEY?
Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and in due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at your b.u.mp of acquisitiveness as at the mean coat of the pauper.
Then, shall we strive for POWER?
The names of the first great kings of the world are forgotten, and the names of all those whose power we envy will drift to forgetfulness soon. What does the most powerful man in the world amount to standing at the brink of Niagara, with his solar plexus trembling? What is his power compared with the force of the wind or the energy of one small wave sweeping along the sh.o.r.e?
The power which man can build up within himself, for himself, is nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified egotism can make it seem worth while. ----