f tiresome nights
and days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon was the
place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered
about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the
cave.

I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been barred in
the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals escaped from their
womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves, the sacred precincts taboo
to women under pain of death. As a youth, by way of the saloon I had
escaped from the narrowness of woman's influence into the wide free world
of men. All ways led to the saloon. The thousand roads of romance and
adventure drew together in the saloon, and thence led out and on over the
world.

"The point is," I concluded my sermon, "that it is the accessibility of
alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol. I did not care for it.
I used to laugh at it. Yet here I am, at the last, possessed with the
drinker's desire. It took twenty years to implant that desire; and for
ten years more that desire has grown. And the effect of satisfying that
desire is anything but good. Temperamentally I am wholesome-hearted and
merry. Yet when I walk with John Barleycorn I suffer all the damnation
of intellectual pessimism.

"But," I hastened to add (I always hasten to add), "John Barleycorn must
have his due. He does tell the truth. That is the curse of it. The
so-called truths of life are not true. They are the vital lies by which
life lives, and John Barleycorn gives them the lie."

"Which does not make toward life," Charmian said.

"Very true," I answered. "And that is the perfectest hell of it. John
Barleycorn makes toward death. That is why I voted for the amendment
to-day. I read back in my life and saw how the accessibility of alcohol
had given me the taste for it. You see, comparatively few alcoholics are
born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry
craves alcohol and drives him resistlessly to it. The great majority of
habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with
actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the
hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned,
just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to learn to smoke
than to learn to drink. They learned because alcohol was so accessible.
The women know the game. They pay for it--the wives and sist