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