44 The Diary of a Drug Fiend
sense of mental exhilaration that goes with boundless
freedom.
Our grandfathers must have known something about
this feeling by living in England before the liberty of
the country was destroyed by legislation, or rather
the delegation of legislation to petty officialdom.
About six months ago I imported some tobacco,
rolls of black perique, the best and purest in the world.
By-and-by I got tired of cutting it up, and sent it to
a tobacconist for the purpose.
Oh, dear no, quite impossible without a permit from
the Custom House!
I suppose I really ought to give myself up to the
police.
Yes, as one gets into the full swing of cocaine, one
loses all consciousness of the bumpy character of this
funny old oblate spheroid. One is really very much
more competent to deal with the affairs of life, that is,
in a certain sense of the word.
M. Coué is perfectly right, just as the Christian
Scientists and all those people are perfectly right, in
saying that half our troubles come from our conscious-
ness of their existence, so that if we forget their exis-
tence, they actually cease to exist !
Haven’t we got an old proverb to the effect that
“what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve
over?”
When one is on one’s cocaine honeymoon, one is
really, to acertain extent, superior to one’s fellows.
One attacks every problem with perfect confidence.
It is a combination of what the French call élan and
what they call tmsouctance.
The British Empire is due to this spirit. Our young
men went out to India and all sorts of places, and
walked all over everybody because they were too
ignorant to realise the difficulties in their way. They
were taught that if one had good blood in one’s veins,
and a public school and university training to habituate
one to being a lord of creation, and to the feeling that