There can be few persons in the world of today who do not wish that their news came to them from different sources than it does. The light sleeper who is awakened before the sun's rays have done more than en purple the skies and is roused out of his slumbers by the early crowing of the cock ~a witless bird, anyway, and one regarded by those who favour their morning tea at seven o'clock or even later as having been unnecessarily cracked up by poets and philosophers of both eastern and western hemispheres as Chanticleer—regrets that there should exist no later and more harmonious announcer of the coming of another day. While those whose debts to Morpheus are not so easily repaid, curse silently at the police. dog which is let out of his dwelling too soon after Chanticleer has shattered the peace of night, and which barks its joy at having at last been freed from the doors and windows which kept it from the throats of the robbers and other denizens of darkness it has been convinced were prowling about all night with evil designs against its master's silverware and crockery. Chanticleer and the lively dog are both sources of news. Both murder sleep and do, therefore, in the individual newspapers which are the doings of every man day by day, really make the front page. But neither is wholly welcome. They are nevertheless direct evidences of something which has occurred and must be noted as such in even the most conservative of news-sheets.
Not everything which appears in the newssheets of this day and age is as well authenticated. Yesterday this journal was able to publish a dispatch from the "Sunday Express" of London which said that a sudden move by the Germans to overrun the whole of France in order to threaten Britain in the western Mediterranean was reported by that paper's New York correspondent, who quoted Vichy dispatches which had been reproduced in a Stockholm paper. To get news of what was going on in France, just across the English Channel, an English newspaper had to quote New York reporting from Stockholm what was likely to happen just round the corner. That is to say that the news had to travel half way round the globe before it reached the London paper in which it saw the light of day, and from London to travel the other halfway round the globe to reach Shanghai where it received the prominence it deserved. It should not be forgotten that the reports of Allied victories in Norway came from Stockholm, apparently next door to the scene of operations, and yet they proved false. From Belgrade comes news of major disturbances in northern Italy, and in some sources they are just as suspect as those which came previously out of Stockholm. There seems to be no way of getting really authenticated news from the sources most likely to give it out, except in the Democratic countries.
Most of the belligerents confine their news to communiques which deny what other belligerents have claimed. Such and such a city has been heavily bombed and great damage has been done to military objective: This is interpreted by the other side as damage to a cow, a rabbit, or church, and a hospital. No one knows what to believe. A notable exception are the British communiqués which, while laying emphasis upon the destruction of schools and churches, never say that no other damage whatever was done. It is possible in their case to read between the lines, that considerable other destruction also occurred. Not so the Axis. With them it would seem that the braying of Balaam's ass is too often confused, with that which comes straight from the horse's mouth.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.