There were days when we called
it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of
it breathed romance. That time is past.
The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low
that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain.
I don't defend it. Alcohol, they are saying to-day, if
taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer
coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric
tissue, so I am informed, a useless wreck.
This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain.
I don't dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere
punk. I know it. I've felt it doing it. They tell me--and
I believe it--that after even one glass of alcohol, or
shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man's working
power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful
thing. After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity
for sustained rigid thought is cut in two. And after
about six glasses the man's working power is reduced by
at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there--in
his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,
even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking
rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless
chunk of geniality, half hidden in the blue smoke of his
cigar.
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