Now there was not a word of truth in this propaganda about trouble between British troops and French civilians, and I thought the leaflet far too crude to have any effect, but I was mistaken; it corresponded to the unreasoning feeling of many Frenchmen that the French Army was bearing all the burden. They particularly resented the fact that whereas at the beginning of the war the French mobilized all men from twenty to forty-seven years old, the British at first mobilized only those from twenty to twenty-five years old. The British Fleet, the French knew theoretically, was just as important for beating Hitler as the French Army, but the British Fleet was far away and its actions were unobserved. Just so today in America we all know theoretically that the presence of the British Fleet in the Atlantic is imperative for our safety, but the British Fleet is far away, and so even when we are sending supplies to the British Fleet and other arms standing between us and our enemy, many Americans think of it as “aiding Britain,” and feel quite unselfish about it. A minor group in America also persists in blaming the British so heavily for their now amply admitted and fully atoned faults of the past, that some of them would almost rather see Munich revenged by German troops in England than have America defend herself there. Finally we have our anti-British Americans of Irish origin who consider Oliver Cromwell more blameworthy than Hitler, although all Irish-Americans are not so purblind by any means. Taking it all in all, however, I should say that there is an even stronger anti-British sentiment in America today than there was in France during the war, and this when coupled to the broader anti-Europe feeling of a great many Americans, increases the difficulty of our acting realistically against a powerful enemy who is taking every advantage of these enfeebling prejudices of ours. Q. _You have named so many similarities between ourselves and the French that it is discouraging indeed, but we have one undeniable advantage of a large population, and we surely are not obsessed by our birth rate._