The Courier Index

MAYOR WALKER ON WATER WAGON

Chief Executor of New York City Swears Off—Appropriate Comments by Ex-Governor Ham Patterson.

Among the more recent converts to the celebrated "water wagon" is Jimmie Walker, the popular mayor of New York City. Political expediency is not responsible for this new position. There's no political thought connected with it. He has just quit drinking liquor and gives a common sense reason for it. Then, along comes Governor Patterson of Tennessee with interesting comment. Ordinarily an item about "dry sentiment" is "dry stuff," but the reader will not find this one quite so dry. Actually, here's a discussion upon the subject that is well worth reading and thinking over. Here's what it's all about, with comment by Governor Patterson:

Jimmie Quits Drinking

Jimmie Walker, the young and popular mayor of New York, has made a very interesting statement according to newspaper reports. Here it is in his own words:

"I no longer drink champagne or alcohol in any form, nor have I since last September. My health is very much better without it. Then, too, while I enjoyed the exhilarating high spots from alcoholic stimulants, the low spots of the next morning collected a heavy toll. I find it more agreeable as well as healthier, to walk on the even pathway with no stimulant.

"And, by the way, the most enjoyable dinner I ever attended in New York was the one you invited me to one year ago, given by 2,200 Methodists. It proved to me that people at a dry dinner could be hilarious and jovial and that all prohibitionists were not long-faced."

What the New York mayor says is worthy of analysis, and some reflection.

In the first place it is not intended as a sermon, and yet such it is in effect. The mayor does not pretend to advise others about their personal habits, much less to fall out with them. He merely states his own experience with liquor and tells why he stopped its use.

What Mr. Walker says will carry weight and convey to others a lesson in practical prohibition such as violent denunciations and drastic laws are incapable of accomplishing.

The mayor has become a personal prohibitionist, but not to control the desires and appetites of others by compulsion.

After all, this is the most effective form of prohibition. It is the kind and perhaps the only kind that will ultimately solve the drink evil. If all men were in Mayor Walker's frame of mind there would be no necessity for the eighteenth amendment or the Volstead act. We could dispense with the worry of sleuths and investigators now employed by the government, save the millions now being annually appropriated to enforce the prohibition laws, and bootlegging would be only an unpleasant memory.

Jimmie Walker has played the game and lost. He knows it is a bad one to beat. For one who has won or come out even, ten thousand have either lost or gained no advantage. Drinking liquor when no direct evil has resulted is a good deal like a poker game with the kitty. A player may hold the best hands and apparently win, but if he plays long enough the feline will eventually swallow it all, and finally everything on the table will go into its insatiable maw.

So it is with the steady drinkers, who say that liquor has never hurt them. If they continue long enough they discover that valuable time has been irretrievably lost, that money has taken wings, that the capacity or enjoyment has been greatly impaired, that health has been slowly undermined.

This has been in effect the testimony of thousands who have quit the game.

(Continued on last page)
(Continued from first page)

Testimony of New York's mayor, and if called upon there are thousands of living witnesses who could corroborate what he says. There are millions more in the grave who, if possible, would add their voices to the general chorus of assent.

Mayor Walker speaks of the exhilarating high spots from alcoholic stimulants which he enjoyed, and of the low spots which followed, collecting such a heavy toll.

Young men, who as a rule, don't like advice, and who kick against it like young mules when the harness is first applied, find in the career of Jimmie Walker much they admire, and they are attracted by his winsome personality. They feel that he is one of them.

They should read and think over what he has so well said, and ask themselves if he is not right.

There is exhilaration in liquor, as the mayor says. There is also the toll to be paid, in the morning, the inevitable price of a good time the night before. This toll is very often a heavy one. Sometimes the levy is upon the happiness of the innocent. Often it is upon character and life itself. Liquor is a flame that rarely fails to scorch the wings of the human moths that play about it.

Presumably Mayor Walker when he used it, drank liquor of the better sort. If he had not the probabilities are he would not be living to give the testimony he has. Mayor Walker has done nothing better in his entire career than make the public statement he has regarding his experience with liquor, and his avowed resolution to quit its use may have a greater influence than he imagines.