TREATMENT OF PROTESTANT FARMERS. [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—As a County Galway doctor and one Who knows " J. C. T." I wish to point out what is known to Protestants
• and Catholics alike who are able and are free to form critical judgments and who are able to bring to a focus and envisage in the full perspectives the evidence as it relates : (1) To Protestants and their homes ; (2) To Catholics and their homes. The cause of trouble is the absence of that control, ever issuant from religion and religious teachings, which has the power to influence and subdue the normal mind. Can religion or its ministers control the abnormal mind, the mind of the degenerate, or the weak, deficient mind, which under the stress and excitement of strife, turmoil, war, becomes irresponsible ?
No. Seventy years' emigration of the hest has produced a terrible racial degeneracy. Why can't " Fair Play " see all the picture ? If every outrage committed on a Protestant farmer in the West of Ireland is proof of religious animosity, what is the outrage committed on a Catholic' farmer a proof of ?
• "Fair Play" (?) who talks about religion and priesteraft of the majority as being the whole cause of Ireland's troubles is not the man to answer that question. The outrages on the Catholics don't count—to him, the man of "Fair Play " (?) apparently.
In that perspective as it deals with County Galway I see yet two sometime dear friends. F. M. S. T. was a Protestant farmer, and a great friend of W. I., a Catholic farmer. They were socially equals. Both were friends of mine. Both were murdered.
I can't memorize one without memorizing the other. I saw a Catholic farmer in the middle of the trouble fleeing from his burning house in Connemara. In the cart were a few house- hold belongings and a statue—a sacred emblem to Catholics, all that was left. But the men who did this would, if they had done a similar turn to a Protestant, be guilty of religious animosity " ; religious animosity, that thing which talks about priestcraft, is the first step down to an animosity which is not religious, but anti-Christian, and anti-Christian symptoms of degeneracy are not animosity.—I am, Sir, &c., CO. G-9.LWAY DOCTOR.
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