It is nearly twenty years since Eric Gill wrote in Blackfriars, ‘It has remained for one unworthy to put his pen to the word, and therefore to the argument, which shall give Capitalism and its attendant monster, Industrialism, their death-blow. The word is Responsibility.’

The argument, that Capitalism (production for money, in such sense that all things made are means of making money) and Industrialism (production by machinery with the working man as a sentient part of it) both ‘reduce the workman to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility,’ was not and is not difficult to follow. It was and is so clearly true as to raise at once the scandal of truth. It was received with applause as a brilliant argument, and it was rejected almost universally, by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, as an impractical one. There were also the incidental reactions of those who were ‘sneeped’ (as they say in the Midlands) by the terms in which it was expressed. ‘Sub-human, indeed !’ and so on.

So, if there was a great cloud of dust put up when Eric was here to press home his own arguments, there is danger now that the word, his word, should be altogether obscured. For the social reformers were, in the main, not really interested, and the interested parties, in the main, wanted his word silenced. It is more than time, therefore, for a restatement.