bright ends across the sky--
Yea, I am Youth because I die!'"

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The foregoing is a sample roaming with the White Logic through the dusk
of my soul.

To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a
man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barleycorn. And the
reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an
hour, is but one mood of the myriad moods of John Barleycorn, and that
the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many
a day and week and month.

My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any strong,
chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-day on the
planet is my unmerited luck--the luck of chest, and shoulders, and
constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in
the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the
stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and
seventeenth years; that a not large percentage of men could have punished
the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the
tale. I survived, through no personal virtue, but because I did not have
the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I possessed an organism
unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barleycorn. And, surviving, I
have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all the long sad road.

It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance, call
it what you will, that brought me through the fires of John Barleycorn.
My life, my career, my joy in living, have not been destroyed. They have
been scorched, it is true; like the survivors of forlorn hopes, they have
by unthinkably miraculous ways come through the fight to marvel at the
tally of the slain.

And like such a survivor of old red war who cries out, "Let there be no
more war!" so I cry out, "Let there be no more poison-fighting by our
youths!" The way to stop war is to stop it. The way to stop drinking is
to stop it. The way China stopped the general use of opium was by
stopping the cultivation and importation of opium. The philosophers,
priests, and doctors of China could have preached themselves breathless
against opium for a thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as
opium was ever accessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated.
We are so made, that is all.

We have with great success made a practice of not leaving arsen