The Chief Apostle, in another place, admonishes his neophytes to let their “moderation” be known of all men.  The revised version translates the word “forbearance” or “gentleness.”  We will try to keep both texts in mind during the informal homily that is the outcome of the question put to my surprised self.

“Surprised,” because in the course of thirty-odd years of literary life I have had so many opportunities of “showing my hand” upon this and other great moral issues, and have improved them so diligently that my readers should by now be tolerably familiar with the platform on which I stand.  Not being a card player, and knowing absolutely nothing of the technicalities of the game, I am at a loss whether or not to look for an implication of underhand work in the phrase chosen by the inquisitor.  If she means that I have kept aught back which that part of the reading public that does me the honor to be interested in my work has a right to know, I hope in the course of this paper to disabuse her mind of the impression.

As a means to this end, I wish to put upon record disapproval that amounts to detestation of the practice of drinking anything that, in the words of the old temperance pledge I “took” when a child, “will make drunk come.”  That was the way it ran.  The Rev. Thomas P. Hunt, one of the best known temperance lecturers in America, used to make us stand up in a body and chant it, he keeping time with head and hand, and the boys imitating him.

   “We do not think
   We’ll ever drink
   Brandy or rum,
   Or anything that makes drunk come”

I have never changed my mind on that head.  What I thought then, I know now, that for half a century I have seen what desolation drunkenness has wrought in our land.  I never see a boy toss off his “cocktail,” or “cobbler”, or “sling,” or by whatever other name the devil’s brew is disguised, with the mannish, knowing air that proves him to be as weak as water, when he would have you think him strong as—­fusel oil!—­that I do not recall the vehement outburst in Mrs. Mulock-Craik’s “A Life for a Life,” of the old clergyman whose only son had filled a drunkard’s grave: 

“If I had a son, and he liked wine, as a child does, perhaps—­a pretty little boy, sitting at table and drinking healths at birthdays; or a schoolboy, proud to do what he sees his father doing—­I would take his glass from him, and fill it with poison—­deadly poison—­that he might kill himself at once, rather than grow up to be his friends’ curse and his own damnation—­a drunkard!”

I lack words in which to express my contempt for the petty ambition, rooted and grounded in vanity, that urges a young fellow to prove the steadiness of his brain by tippling what he does not want, or even like.  For not one in fifty of those who take “nips” and “coolers,” cared for the taste of the perilous stuff at the first or twentieth trial.  He proved himself a man, one of the stronger parts of creation, by pouring liquid fire down his quailing throat until he could do so without winking.  He swears and smokes cigarettes at street corners for the same reason.