sy 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 hig