Word: dicta
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TREATISE ON RIGHT & WRONG-H. L. Mencken-Knopf ($3). Not many years ago Henry Louis Mencken was the god of U. S. liberal undergraduates, his lightest obiter dicta the unquestioned orders of their day. With a new. generation his authority has waned until now he appears an old-fashioned orthodox heretic. The men-of-straw he buffeted to the yelling delight of his admirers have by this time had such a bludgeoning that they look more like scarecrows than opponents. But he still goes on pounding the stuffing out of bogeymen that once seemed giants. Treatise on Right & Wrong...
What is, perhaps, the most aggravating feature of Mr. Sullivan's dicta is not the aura of the Union League Club in late afternoon, nor the pomposity of his crystalized oratory, but the insistence that these New Dealers are embarking on adventures whose consequence they neither guess nor consider, that these striplings are being carried away by the Fun of It All with no though of the implications of their wild brainstorms, beyond attaining the goal of oppressive collectivism. While it is perfectly true that Washington could do very well with a dozen economists above the stature of Messrs. Warren...
...delicacy of the issue is Mr. Mencken's thin contribution. By a series of magnificent obiter dicta he manages to make reviews of works by Messer Herbert Agar and Will Durant pinch-hit for his missing editorials. The first of these reveals in a few well-chosen words the editor's reaction to N. R. A. and all that; the second says a few words on the Slav Utopia (Mencken's phrase for Red Russia) which should be prescribed reading to every member of the Harvard Socialist-Liberal-Club-Students'-League Knights-of-the-White-Kamelia organization. Further than this...
...colleges throughout the land last week janitors and charladies began once more to shuffle about their leisurely jobs. Pop-eyed new students and blase old ones busied themselves with multitudinous activities. College presidents delivered themselves of sapient dicta. College merchants once more did business. The Press delivered its annual salutes to learning...
...face through it all, kept face by being unique among discredited statesmen in that he appeared really to believe what he was saying, even though he had been saying something very different ten years ago, or last month, or yesterday. He must have believed in himself, and in his dicta however incipient, for not even the chanciest wag would have dared to tell the seething followers of Arabia in Cairo that British rule in Egypt was a divine thing, and that to oppose it was heresy, but only a man who believed this and was ready to be garroted...