As I say, I drank sparingly and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition came.

Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult Americans began doing--which was to take a drink when the opportunity offered.

As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet.

He doesn't particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is summarily denied him and because he's afraid he may never again get a whack at unlimited jam.
To my way of thinking, the main result of the effort drastically to enforce Prohibition, aside from making us a nation of law-breakers, law-evaders, sneaks, bribers, boot-leggers, bigots, corruptionists and moral cowards, has been to transfer the burden of inebriety from one set of shoulders to another set of shoulders.

Men who formerly drank to excess have sobered up, against their will, for lack of cash or lack of chance to buy hard liquor.