Chapter XXXVIII

by Jack London

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

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

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

　　It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck,chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the firesof John Barleycorn. My life, my career, my joy in living, havenot been destroyed. They have been scorched, it is true; like thesurvivors of forlorn hopes, they have by unthinkably miraculousways 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 therebe 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. Theway to stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped thegeneral use of opium was by stopping the cultivation andimportation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors ofChina could have preached themselves breathless against opium fora thousand years, and the use of opium, so long as opium was everaccessible and obtainable, would have continued unabated. We areso made, that is all.

　　We have with great success made a practice of not leaving arsenicand strychnine, and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying aroundfor our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barleycorn thesame way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed andlegal, to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics nor foralcoholics do I write, but for our youths, for those who possessno more than the adventure-stings and the genial predispositions,the social man-impulses, which are twisted all awry by ourbarbarian civilisation which feeds them poison on all the corners.It is the healthy, normal boys, now born or being born, for whom Iwrite.

　　It was for this reason, more than any other, and more ardentlythan any other, that I rode down into the Valley of the Moon, alla-jingle, and voted for equal suffrage. I voted that women mightvote, because I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race,would vote John Barleycorn out of existence and back into thehistorical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If I thusseem to cry out as one hurt, please remember that I have beensorely bruised and that I do dislike the thought that any son ordaughter of mine or yours should be similarly bruised.

　　The women are the true conservators of the race. The men are thewastrels, the adventure-lovers and gamblers, and in the end it isby their women that they are saved. About man's first experimentin chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all thegenerations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drinkit. And there has never been a day when the women have notresented man's use of alcohol, though they have never had thepower to give weight to their resentment. The moment women getthe vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do isto close the saloons. In a thousand generations to come men ofthemselves will not close the saloons. As well expect themorphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out ofexistence.

　　The women know. They have paid an incalculable price of sweat andtears for man's use of alcohol. Ever jealous for the race, theywill legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born; and for thebabes of girls, too, for they must be the mothers, wives, andsisters of these boys.

　　And it will be easy. The only ones that will be hurt will be thetopers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation. I am one ofthese, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic withJohn Barleycorn, that it won't hurt me very much to stop drinkingwhen no one else drinks and when no drink is obtainable. On theother hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are sonormally non-alcoholic, that, never having had access to alcohol,they will never miss it. They will know of the saloon only in thepages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaintold custom similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches.