[Illustration:  As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum and crying official news of the sugar ration]

It was a sad blow to Henry and me, who thought our calling was a torch-bearer of civilization.  Indeed, one may digress and say that we found the whole estate of the press in France rather disenchanting.  For advertising is not regarded as entirely “ethical” in France.  The big stores sometimes do not advertise at all; because people look with the same suspicion on advertising drygoods and clothing merchants as we in America look upon advertising lawyers and doctors.  So newspapers too often have to sell their editorial opinions, and the press has small influence in France, compared with the influence of the press in what we call the Anglo-Saxon countries.

But in that French village of twenty-five thousand people without a newspaper we found a civilization that compared favourably with the civilization in any American town.  While the tire was going on it developed that a cog had slipped in the transgression of the car—­or something of the sort, so we were laid up for an hour, and we piled out of our seats and took in the town.  We found four good bookstores there—­rather larger than our bookstores at home.  We found two or three big co-operative stores largely patronized by industrial workers and farmers, and they were better stores by half than any cooperative stores we had seen in America.  For with us the co-operative store is generally a sad failure.  Our farmers talk big about cooperation, but they sneak around and patronize the stores that offer the best bargains, and our industrial workers haven’t begun to realize how co-operative buying will help them.  We found no big stores, in the American sense, but we found many bright, well-kept shops.  In electrical supplies we found the show windows up to the American average, which is high indeed; but in plumbing there was a sag.  We discovered that the town had comparatively few sewers.  The big, white-tiled bathroom with its carload of modern fixtures which adorns the show window of at least one plumber’s shop in every American town—­we missed.  The bathtub is not a household need in France.  Yet some way we surmised that if our towns could have better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might have felt easier in our minds for the palladiums of our liberties.  And it can’t be laid to the picture shows—­this slump in the American book reading average; for the French towns are just as full of picture shows as American towns.  That superiority in bookstores which lies with the French over the Americans, should give us pause.  It more than overbalances our superiority in country newspapers.  And then as we walked about the town that evening in the sunset pondering upon these things we came to the town park.