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Try Whiskey On Your Friend’s Eyeball
by
Then let him dilute the whiskey with water–four or five parts water to one of whiskey. That dilution, rubbed into the other eye, instead of irritating it, will act as a gentle stimulant. It will produce an agreeable effect.
When your friend has experimented with the whiskey “straight” and diluted, deliver to him this little lecture:
“One drop of pure whiskey on your eyeball makes it hard to use the eye. That glass of whiskey that you are now pouring into yourself would blind you absolutely, at least for a time. If straight whiskey has such an effect on the covering of the eyeball, must not its effect be equally injurious to the covering of the stomach and intestines, which is the same as that of the eye?
“If diluting your whiskey makes it so much better as an eye-wash, would not diluting it make it better also as a ‘stomach-wash’?”
One other thing: When you argue with a drunkard don’t tell him that any man can cure himself if he will “only be a man.” The drunkard knows that that is not so. Tell him, on the contrary, that not one man in fifty, not one woman in a hundred, can overcome the drink habit.
He will wink his tired eyes at you and say: “I want you distinctly to understand that I’m one in a hundred.” Tell him how difficult it is–not how easy–and thus stir up his ambition. —-
Above all, when you start out to admonish or despise the victim of bad habits, just remember that you have no notion whatever of what you criticise. Not one drunkard in a hundred has will power to cure himself. Not one “virtuous” man in a thousand has imagination enough to realize the drunkard’s temptation and suffering. We offer to your consideration this other extract from Lecky’s book, quoted above:
“The great majority of uncharitable judgments in the world may be traced to a deficiency of imagination. * * * To realize with any adequacy the force of a passion we have never experienced, to conceive a type of character radically different from our own, * * * requires a power of imagination which is among the rarest of human endowments.”