At the close of one fair autumn day our car developed tire trouble, in a village “Somewhere in France,” not far from the headquarters of the American Army.  There are four excellent reasons for deleting the name of the town.  First, the censor might not like to have it printed; second, because the name of the place has escaped my memory; third, because there is a munition factory there and it should not be mentioned, and fourth, because even if the name of the place returned to me, its spelling would get lost in transit.  In passing it should be said in this connection that it seemed to Henry and me that the one thing France really needed was a pronounceable language and phonetic spelling.  The village where we stopped really was not a village in the Kansas sense; it was twice as big as Emporia and nearly half as big as Wichita, which is 70,000.  But the thing that made the place seem like a village to us was the town crier.  As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum and crying the official news of the sugar ration; he was telling the people where they could get sugar, how much they should pay for it and how much they should use for each member of a family a month.

“Why,” asked Henry of an English speaking bystander, “don’t you put that in your daily newspaper; why keep up the old custom?”

“We have no daily newspaper,” answered the inhabitant.

“All right, then, is there any reason why the news won’t wait for the weekly?” asked Henry.

“And we have no weekly and no monthly and no annual.  We have no newspaper in this town.”

That stumped us both.  In America every town of five thousand has its daily newspaper, and frequently two dailies, and in the West every town of five hundred people has its weekly newspaper.  With us the newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community.  A community of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper—­and we found that this community never had supported a newspaper—­was unthinkable to us in terms of any civilization that we knew.  How do they know about the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told us that the churches recorded those things.  How do they know about the scandal?  And we remembered that scandal was older than the press; it was the father of the press, as the devil is the father of lies.  How do they know how to vote?  And they told us that newspapers hindered rather than helped that function.  How did they record local history?  And in our hearts, we knew who had recorded so much local history, that most of it is not worth recording and that tradition takes care of what is left.  But how did they manage to create a town spirit, to vote the bonds for the city waterworks, to establish the public library, to enforce the laws, to organize the Chamber of Commerce, to get up subscriptions for this, that or the other public benevolence?  And men shook their heads and said:  Water has run down hill many years; perhaps it will keep on running, even without a newspaper.