A. I am glad to say there are, and enough, I devoutly hope, to save us from their fate. We have a leader; the French had none. We are not divided as badly as the French were divided. Despite the fierceness of our political passions, it would be a very exceptional American indeed who would say, “I’d rather have Hitler than Roosevelt,” as so many Frenchmen used to say, “We’d rather have Hitler than Leon Blum.” We are physically a healthier people than the French. There is hardly one of the weaknesses now perceptible in the American people that would not be swept away by the fact of our going to war, but there is hardly one of them which can be removed by any other means. The most encouraging difference between the French and American democracies is the quality and character of our newspapers. American newspapers bring to their readers today a greater volume of news, of greater accuracy, than has ever been delivered to an audience of newspaper readers in the history of the world. It has been my job for nearly two decades to study the newspapers of a score of countries, not superficially but with the businesslike object of gleaning news. I had to read thirty-two German newspapers a day when I was correspondent in Berlin; and a dozen or so daily in Paris. It is no exaggeration to say that the reader of the _New York Times_, or the _New York Herald-Tribune_, or the _Chicago Daily News_, or any one of half a dozen of our great metropolitan dailies, has more detailed and true information about what is going on in the world than if he were able by magic to accumulate all the newspapers published everywhere else on earth, and were able equally by magic to read them all in the original. Often I am asked, “How can we know the truth? Everything is so confusing. Aren’t we fed with propaganda?” The answer is you can know the truth by reading your newspapers thoroughly and exercising common sense in balancing the reports from the belligerent countries against each other. No war has ever been fought in such a blazing light of information. Never has such a quantity of news been put before a people as we Americans have before us at breakfast every day and from then on until midnight. American newspapers are doing today the most superb job ever done by daily journals. But that is not their chief merit. Their chief merit is their honesty and incorruptibility and their sincere endeavor to be fair and objective. These qualities have enabled the American press, since the foundation of the United States, to be the equal in importance to the executive or the legislative or the judicial branch of government. It is the vigilant watchman over the functioning of the other three branches of government.