ENGLISHMAN AND IRISHMAN

Snt,--Dr. O'Connor asked me in your issue of December 19—I have been abroad—what I mean by " professional Anglophobe . . .
Who gets paid for it ?" The word professional does not necessarily imply payment. It is sontetimes used as the equivalent of " expert " or • persistent." A man who makes a profession of faith is not paid and no editor, I am suie, would pay, though some seem prepared to print, the professions of Anglophobic faith which from time to time find their way into the columns of the Press.
it If I remember rightly," states Dr, O'Connor, " Mr. Lunn has defended both the hunger blockade and the atomic bomb in THE CramLie HERALD. Am I a ' professional Anglophobe because I believe that no weapon is more brutal than the former or as savage as the latter 7 "
Dr. O'Connor can neither " remember rightly " nor even read rightly. I have stated not once but many times that my object in discussing bombing was to discover whether there is any theological reason for condoning a naval blockade and condemning bombing.
Dr. O'Connor states that I have " attributed to Miss Foss a meaning that no ordinary reader would take from her letter." Dr. O'Connor should justify or apologise for this statement What I did was to quote Miss Foss' own statement " for the success of this campaign it was necessary that these human beings v.ere burnt alive." 1 asserted that Miss Foss had produced no scrap of evidence to jusstify that monstrous charge.
What is Dr. O'Connor's exact complaint? Am I or am 1 not entitled to ask for evidence in support of such a charge ?
Again, is there the remotest justification for Dr. O'Connor's remark that I adopt a " Thank God, 1 am not like other men" attitude " on behalf of all and sundry of his countrymen " ? What I do maintain is that the brutalities which occur in all wars (including the Irish Civil War on both sides) are entirely different from the systematic planned horrors of Nazi or Communist regimes. But then, I happen to be a Catholic and as such believe that nations which substitute the worship of race or of Marx for the worship of God pay for their apostasy by horrors tuidreamt of in countries which are still Christian.
Characteristic is the unconscious self-revelation of Dr. O'Connor's contemptuous reference to me as " this Englishman." Is THE ComoLee HERALD supposed to be extraterritorial, an organ of Irish Catholicism ? And if not, why is it necessary to draw attention to my nationality ?
Dr. O'Connor is one of that happily diminishing minority of Irishmen who suspect the Catholicism of any Englishman who defends his own countrymen against attack with the same energy with which Irishmen defend the, honour of Ireland. Is patriotism an Obligation in Ireland and a mortal sin in England ? As, however, I have been represented as a kind of super Blimp by Dr. O'Connor, you may allow me to state that I had a very unhappy first term at Harrow because I was a pro-Boer, that I was the first Englishman to defend Sinn Fein at the Oxford Union, that I protested against the continuance of the blockade in Germany at the end of the first world war and interviewed Mr. Lloyd George's secretary on this subject, and that I warmly supported in your columns Mr. Victor Gollancz's plea for a more Christian treatment of Germany.
As a specimen of Dr. O'Connor's controversial style in which unnecessary adjectives conceal a certain poverty of thought I may quote: " Mr. Lunn's letter stinks of the red herring . . It resorts to a particularly juvenile and repulsive form of meanness in firmly planting on Miss Foss a label obviously intended to be offensive, and then declaring, 'I do not suggest that Miss Foss is one of them .." How else could I make it clear that I was distinguishing between Miss Foss and the professional Anglophobes who had written to me than by the remark "I do not suggest that Miss Foss is one of them ' ?
ARNOLD LUNN.
The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.