Notes on An Industrial Tour

Extract

In the course of a tour of the Industrial North and Midlands extending over three months and meeting, in the main, working men, their wives and families, several facts have presented themselves that concern Catholics.

The first: that there is now at work in industry a generation more alive to the inequalities of the Capitalist system than there was ever before. This is undoubtedly the fruit of education. It is arguable how far this education (elementary and secondary) has been of real worth to the Nation as a whole, and it is quite certain that a great deal of the dissatisfaction with things as they are is not, as many magistrates and social workers would have us believe, entirely due to the influence of the Cinema. The Cinema certainly does harm in so far as it is largely amoral, but not in showing pictures of a standard of living that so many of the audience believe, quite sincerely, to be theirs by right; it is only exacerbating an already running sore.

The second: the great increase of Left propaganda and ideas. In the majority of factories visited there was either the group or an individual which had taken on itself the dissemination of ideas, sometimes literature, and always with extreme fervour. They are on the spot wherever an argument starts and, once having made their “contact,” they do all they can to pin their man (or woman) down.