The bartender stands studying the procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of clean-aproned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the multitude to perdition on the other side of the river. But what is YOUR business there? You might as well be found inside an opium den. The drink swallowed at the bar braces you, does it? If you think you need a drink, you REALLY need sleep, or better nourishment, or you need to live more sensibly. Drink will not give you what you need. It may for a moment make your nerves cease tormenting you. It may do in your system for an hour what opium does in the Chinese for a whole day. But if it lifts you up high, it drops you down HARD. And remember: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MODERATE DRINKING AT A BAR. You THINK you can take your occasional drink safely and philosophize about the procession that passes the bartender. But the bartender KNOWS that you are no different from the others. They all began as you are beginning. They all, in the early stages, despised their own forerunners. They were once as you are, and the bartender KNOWS that the chances are all in favor of your being eventually like one of them. Even like the poor, thin, nervous drinker of hard whiskey, who once wondered why men drink too much. ---- The bartender's procession is a sad one, and you who still think yourself safe are the saddest atom in the line, for you are there without sufficient excuse. It is a long procession, and its end is far off. It is born of the fact that life is dull, competition is keen, and ambition so often ends in sawdust failure. A better chance for strugglers, a more generous reward for hard work, better organization of social life, solution of the great unsolved problem of real civilization, will end the bartender's procession. Meanwhile, keep out of it if you can. And be glad if it can be suspended, temporarily at least, on Sundays. WHAT SHOULD BE A MAN'S OBJECT IN LIFE? Sermons in stones are familiar, but few take the trouble to dig them out. Certainly none looks for sermons in a one-cent evening newspaper. At the same time, will you kindly think over and answer the question that heads this column? Here we are, marooned for a few days on a flying ball of earth. We don't know how we got here. We don't know where we are going. We are full of beautiful and satisfying FAITH. But we don't KNOW. Into this Universe, and WHY not knowing, Nor WHENCE, like Water, willy-nilly flowing; And out of it as Wind along the Waste, I know not WHITHER, willy-nilly blowing. That's the way Omar, the old tent-maker, puts it. ---- We drift from dinner to the theatre, thence to bed, thence to breakfast, thence to work, and so on. Or, if in hard luck, we struggle and wail, "cursing our day," or more frequently cursing society. We rarely stop to think what it is all about, or what we are here for. ----