eached the point where redress can be had from the hands of the
Almighty alone." Catherine II. thought justice satisfied when
"everyone takes something." Frederick II. wrote to his brother,
"The partition will unite the three religions, Greek, Catholic, and
Calvinist; for we would take our communion from the same
consecrated body, which is Poland." Only Maria Theresa felt a
twinge of conscience. She took but she felt the shame of it. She
wrote: "We have by our moderation and fidelity to our engagements
acquired the confidence, I may venture to say the admiration, of
Europe.... One year has lost it all. I confess, it is difficult to
endure it, and that nothing in the world has cost me more than the
loss of our good name." It is a strange phenomenon that in matters
where the unsophisticated human conscience so promptly pronounces
judgment and spontaneously condemns, the solid mass of moral
conviction should count for nothing in affairs of state. Against it
a purely national prejudice has never failed to prevail.

Montaigne does not formulate his comparisons so clearly; nor does Sir
Thomas Browne touch so unerringly the canker in the root of the
politics of his time; but one cannot saturate oneself in the works of
either without contrasting them with the physiocrats of the eighteenth
century, who tore up the cockles and the wheat together.

Of all American writers Mr. H. L. Mencken is the most adventurous, and
one might almost say the cleverest. He could not be dull if he tried.
This is admirably exemplified in "The American Language," which appears
in a second edition, revised and enlarged and dated 1921. We are told
that Mencken was born in Baltimore on September 12, 1880; that his
family has been settled in Maryland for nearly a hundred years; and that
he is of mixed ancestry, chiefly German, Irish, and English. He is,
therefore, a typical American, and well qualified to write on "The
American Language." Mr. Mencken truly says that the weakest courses in
our universities are those which concern themselves with written and
spoken English. He adds that such grammar as is taught in our schools
and colleges

is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false
inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, eager only to
break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a rule; and its frank aim
is to create in us a high