up for quitting: So far, liquor hasn't done anything to you except cause you to waste some time that might have been otherwise employed; but it will get you, just as it has landed a lot of your friends, if you stay by it. Wouldn't it be better to miss some of this stuff you have come to think of as fun, and live longer? There is no novelty in drinking to you. You haven't an appetite that cannot be checked, but you will have if you stick to it much longer. Why not quit and take a chance at a new mode of living, especially when you know absolutely that every health reason, every future-prospect reason, every atom of good sense in you, tells you there is nothing to be gained by keeping at it, and that all may be lost?

Well, I pondered over that a long time. I had watched miserable wretches who had struggled to stay on the waterwagon—sometimes with amusement. I knew what they had to stand if they tried to associate with their former companions; I knew the apparent difficulties and the disadvantages of this new mode of life. On the other hand, I was convinced that, so far as I was concerned, without trying to lay down a rule for any other man, I would be an ass if I didn't quit it immediately, while I was well and all right, instead of waiting until I had to quit on a doctor's orders, or got to that stage when I couldn't quit.

It was no easy thing to make the decision. It is hard to change the habits and associations of twenty years! I had a good understanding of myself. I was no hero. I liked the fun of it, the companionship of it, better than any one. I like my friends and, I hope and think, they like me. It seemed to me that I needed it in my business, for I was always dealing with men who did drink.

I wrestled with it for some weeks. I thought it all out, up one side and down the other. Then I quit. Also I stayed quit. And believe me, ladies and gentlemen and all others present, it was no fool of a job.

I have learned many things since I went on the waterwagon for fair—many things about my fellowmen and many things about myself. Most of these things radiate round the innate hypocrisy 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