drinking when no one else drinks and
when no drink is obtainable. On the other hand, the overwhelming
proportion of young men are so normally non-alcoholic, that, never having
had access to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know of the
saloon only in the pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as
a quaint old custom similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Of course, no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of
the person down to the last moment. But mine is no tale of a reformed
drunkard. I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed.

It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and
forty-eight days in a windjammer around the Horn. I took no private
supply of alcohol along, and, though there was no day of those one
hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a drink from the
captain, I did not take a drink. I did not take a drink because I did
not desire a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere for
drinking was not present, and in my system there was no organic need for
alcohol. My chemistry did not demand alcohol.

So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem: THIS IS
SO EASY, WHY NOT KEEP IT UP WHEN YOU GET BACK ON LAND? I weighed this
problem carefully. I weighed it for five months, in a state of absolute
non-contact with alcohol. And out of the data of past experience, I
reached certain conclusions.

In the first place, I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in
a hundred thousand is a genuine, chemical dipsomaniac. Drinking, as I
deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mind. It is unlike tobacco,
or cocaine, or morphine, or all the rest of the long list of drugs. The
desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a
matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social
soil. Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers
begin socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social
connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the
first part of this narrative. These social connotations are the stuff of
which the drink habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself
plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social
atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is rarely born these days,
who, without long training in the social associati