Whatever his political bias, the reader will not be left unmoved by a true tale of human struggle and suffering and of a tragic failure of society for a hundred years. In the present struggle of civilization we must disengage that which we have set out to defend from our share in the guilt of the common disaster. Miss Wilkinson’s book must impress us anew with the evils of a capitalist society, which she traces back through one example to their beginnings in the Industrial Revolution. These evils, for which she advocates a mainly political remedy, come from as brazenfaced a rejection of Christian and human values as any that have been made. Habit and some faith in human progress and in the professions of governments have partly blinded us. But now comes the day of reckoning, when past crimes and their consequences must be paid for, even to the possible collapse of civilization and the merciless persecution of our Christianity which we have allowed to be so denied.

The history of ‘the town that was murdered’ suggests more than the interplay of economic and political forces. It raises the issue of human responsibility in the face of poverty and riches, the destiny of the individual caught in the stranglehold of the ‘World.’ The figure of the political, commercial and financial magnate haunting the pages of the book and the streets of Jarrow is not so much that of the individual capitalist; it is that of Dives, the victim not of system and fate, but of freedom and sin, and, finally, of God’s avenging mercy to the poor.