TEMPERANCE COLUMN.

Otago Witness, Issue 4029, 2 June 1931, Page 79

TEMPERANCE COLUMN.

(Published by arrangement with the United Temperance Rccorm Council.) WHY I GAVE UP DRINK. By Hannan Swaffer, the London Dramatic Critic. In the offices I used to read printed Cards, the work of some humorist, which said: “If whisky interferes with your business, give up business.” One morning I woke up with a very fat head, and decided I would give up whisky. The war was costing us a great deal of money. My income tax came that year to the same amount I was spending on drink. A bottle of wine for lunch, a bottle of wine for dinner, and odd liqueur brandies soon mount up. I realised that, at a time when the British Empire was mourning the loss of 900,000 young men who gave their lives for their country, when I saw in every street the crippled and the blind, men who had lost their limbs or their sight, it wasn’t very much for me to sacrifice if I gave up alcohol. The dead could not be brought back certainly, nor could the limbs of the crippled or the eyes of the blind be replaced. But in my own case, I could wipe out my cost of the war by givintr up drinking. I made the decision to leave off drinking nearly eight years ago, and never once have I regretted it, never once have I wanted a drink, never once did I intend starting again. I belong to a profession of writers who use their brains hard and tire them, men who, if they feel worn after a hard day’s work, fly to stimulant, if they are used to it, usually to find that the drink goes to their heads. In jny own case, I knew from long experience that the intuitive news sense which I possess became intensified to an uncanny degree if I drank a glass of whisky too much. I could sense the secrets of people’s minds; their souls were bare to me.

I knew, if I felt cross with them, exactly where I could hurt most, and how often. Often I did it without knowing. On many mornings I have wakened up and wondered how much I had hurt other people with the things that I had said. They were usually, bitterly, terribly true, but that was all the more reason, I suppose, why I should not have said them. About this time a millionaire friend of mine, one somewhat similar in type, drank too much at a public dinner, and told so much truth about another millionaire friend that, in. consequence, they started a financial war which could have ended in the ruin of one, if not both. Now, these were not silly, senseless people, but two of the best-known financiers in England. Fortunately mutual friends intervened, or, in the battle of millions that was begun, a vast industry might have become paralysed. In settling the trouble, the man who started the row said: “I will never do this again. I’ll quit drinking.” He did. Not many weeks afterwards, another friend of mine, a man known as a “ sportsman ” on both sides of the Atlantic, fell sick, almost unto death. I have never seen him drunk in my life, but, day after day, for many years, he had been open-hearted and hospitable to everybody, and, in the course of it, had drunk several bottles of champagne every day. “ I’ll give it up,” he said. He did. Then there came other evidence that men of a certain type cannot, and should not, drink. A famous artist I know went nearly insane; another man, even more successful in another branch of artistic effort, found his work falling off in quality and always late. He had too many friends. And, when you are drinking alcohol and you know everybody, work takes a lot of doing. . . . About this same time, too, one of the most brilliant brains in England was failing lamentably because of his fondness for liquor. His was by far the worst case of all these. One night, when he spoke on the wireless, half the country, which was listening, knew he was drunk. These cases accumulated. I realised that, if London was talking sometimes of people like these, it was sometimes talking of me. You cannot have all things in this life. You cannot have a keen imagination, an alert brain, a quick, intuitive sense, and over-indulgence. Drinking is for the stodgy and the thick. Once before I quit drinking for a time. Then, on my way to America, I started again, and in New York—it was just when prohibition was coming in—l realised that I was at the mercy of a lot of crooks whenever I wanted to break the law. Why should a sane, honest person like myself, I argued, consort with a lot of bootleggers to get something he could do without? Why should I sneak around corners to get Bacardi rum? Why should I risk arrest for alcohol that might be made from wood and blind me?

Why should I make a boast of evading a law passed, I believe, in the interests of all? I soon stopped it again. I recognised _ that, if I were the guest of the ■American nation. I should at least respect the law and its administration. . I have always been a prohibitionist, more when I was drinking than now when I am not. For I always knew that drinking alcohol was a waste of money, stupid, and waste of time, just as I believe that smoking i,s, although I still smoke all day. Alcohol brightens friendship, you are told,, and makes dinner parties easier. Don’t you believe it!

Not until you become a teetotaller, as I have done, do you realise the sheer drivel that people talk when they have had three cocktails. As you sit there listening, bone-dry, .you shiver at the thought that you once talked nonsense like that. They go on saying the same thing, not knowing it was never worth saying once, and when you don’t laugh they get angry. So you go homer —and work. “ But for alcohol we shouldn’t have any poets,” we are told. ' This is not true. Why do brewers, who hate poets, make such a fuss of that?

“ Beer, beer, glorious beer, Fill yourself right up to here,” is the only poetry they know. Besides, there are quite enough dead poets as it it. Some of them died of drink. Anyway, the brewers let lots of the other poets starve. You can read the verses of a’dead man quite as easily as if he were living in the next street.

The truth is, of course, that whereas I know most of the great authors in my own country, T know that most of them are very abstemious men, and that the most original of them all, George Bernard Shaw, never drank alcohol in his life. Do not imagine from all these remarks that I used to spend all my time drinking; I have known men who could drink 10 times as much as I did and then walk home. But I found that drinking led me into all sorts of company I would scorn if I were merely drinking tea. I have lent more money in public house bars than anywhere else in the world. I have been paid back less money in public house bars than anywhere else I know. Really, I don’t see why, because I was buying on e drink, I should lend other people the money to buy 10. No. I have given up drink for good.—The Clarion.