The importance of Gill’s political writings lies in their linking of two major traditions of response to industrial capitalism, that of libertarian socialism and that of Catholicism. In the line of Morris and Kropotkin he is a significant figure; in the history of modem English Catholicism, a major one.

Industrialism in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe can be seen as consisting of two basic phases. In the first industrial revolution there was a breaking of the traditional vertical links between social strata and a tendency for them to polarise into selfconsciously opposed classes. In the second wave of the industrial revolution the horizontal links of family, workplace and voluntary association which had survived are weakened or broken. A basic strand of socialist thought was preoccupied with the first development. It tended to welcome the polarization of social classes and to stress the conquest of state power and state control of industry as the agent of the liberation of individuals. In their very different ways, anarchists and catholics were as responsive to the second as to the first development of industrialism. Attention to the disruption of horizontal relations of work and domestic life produces an hostility towards, at least a scepticism about, the role of the state, of centralization, and of the mass-organization of work. Issues of control and quality of life predominate, whether the focus is on the family, the individual, or group of workers.