The Lakeland evening telegram. (Lakeland, Fla.) 1911-1922, 1915-07-09
CATS AND HIS CANDIDACY
West Florida Preacher Made His
Spiel for the Governorship
in the Park Last Night

iud pfcdshSI, WlO ndilS IRON lie
.Funiak Springs in that section
made speech in Mum park las
night to about $50 people in advo
cacy of his candidacy for the gov
ernorship of Florida.
He spoke for about an hour ant
a half and said nothing about an,
State issue Or anything that con
Germs the Office of governor of Flor
ida or the duties that would law
fully devolve upon him in the event
of his election lie exhorted in
stentorian tones in behalf of his
right to free speech and gave his
audience his Interpretation of that
right by using his own tongue dur
ing the greater part of his speech
for venomously abusing and be-
fouling one of the great RELIGIOUS
denominations of the country And
he did this in a public park in Lake
| land dedicated to the use of the peo-
! pie. regardless of their religious
faith and where it was supposed
that they could come and enjoy the
privileges and pleasures of the place
without being compelled to listen to
an unbroken stream of insults
against the church to which millions
of respectable American men and
! women belong
The body and bulk of the speech
was merely a rehash of what Tom
Watson and a paper called The Men
ace have been saying with incessant
iteration for years past against the
Catholic church and there was
nothing new in it. The Telegram is
purely a, secular paper and has no
call to defend any denomination or
form of religious belief further than
to insist that in free America ev-
cry man has right to worship God
according to the dictates of his own
conscience and he is not to be pro-
scribed or prosecuted for doing so.
That is good American doctrine, we
believe, and it has been held so
since the days of Thomas jefferson,
the man who wrote our Declaration
of independence.
And right here it is necessary to
say that when Cats stated in his
speech last night that the Telegram
was a Catholic paper he uttered an
outrageous and wantOn falsehood
without trace or grain of truth in
it. The people of Lakeland and
Polk county who have been reading
the Telegram for years know this
to be so. The paper is absolutely
colorless in all UNCONVENTIONAL or
religious matters and the constant
and earnest desire of its editor has
been to keep it so. And the Protes-
tant ministers of Lakeland will bear
witness that they have never seen
one word of editorial expression in
this paper in which the editor
sought to SWerve it from the
straight line of secular publica-
ton. treating all churches alike. It
is doubtless true that the paper has
given more than hundred lines to
Protestant churches and their af-
fairs where 1t has given one to the |
Catholic church, the only reference
to the latter denomination being a
hrinf nnfinn nf oh,r
or three lines in length among sim
liar notices for the other churches |
in the Saturday issue. Such gross
and fagrant misrepresentation by |
Cats will do the Telegram no harm
and we can assure him that it will
do him no good.
Nor will his sighting reference
to Mr.. Hetherington in his speech
last night do him any good. Mr..
Fetherin gton is now absent on the
Pacific coast and is not here to |
speak for himself, but the people of |
Lakeland know him and know him
well. For more than ten years he
has been useful and honored citi- |
zen here without a stain upon his
private or public life. He has lived
in the open as every newspaper man
does and he counts among his
friends practically the whole body
OF our people. AS with every man
of force and conviction, there may
be some who have prejudices against |
him, but they are very few indeed,
and even not one of them, if there |
be such, can say with any truth |
that he has ever sought to use his |
paper to assail the religious faith of |
others or to impose his own upon
his readers.
He is a broad-minded, generous.
kindly, and charitable man, toler-
ant to the last degree, and his fell
low citizens of Lakeland will know
how to take any attempt by a noisy,
office-seeker travelling up and down
the State to injure or defame him
because he exercises his plain right |
as an American citizen to choose his |
own religious faith and worship God Il
rs his conscience dictates.