In Catalonia and Aragón, in the first year of war, there were two things that impressed me. One was the apparent absence of any religious feeling whatever among the mass of the people. Admittedly at the time it might have been dangerous to admit openly to religious belief – still, one cannot be altogether deceived about a thing like that. The second was the fact that most of the wrecked or damaged churches that I saw were new ones; their predecessors had been burnt down in earlier disturbances. And this raises the thought, when was the last church burnt down in England? Probably not since Cromwell. A mob of English farm hands sacking the parish church would be something next door to unthinkable. Why? Because at present the conditions of class warfare simply do not exist in England. In Spain, for a century past, millions of people had had to live in conditions that were beyond bearing. Over huge tracts of country peasants who were serfs in everything but name worked enormous hours for wages of sixpence a day. In these conditions you get something that we have not got in England, a real hatred of the status quo, a real willingness to kill and burn. But the Church was part of the status quo; its influence was on the side of the wealthy. In many villages the huge garish church, with the cluster of miserable mud huts surrounding it, must have seemed the visible symbol of property. Naturally, Catholic writers have of late been denying this. The Church was not corrupt, it was anything but wealthy, the priests were often good Republicans, etc., etc. The answer is that the Spanish common people, whose opinion on this matter is worth something, did not think so. In the eyes of at any rate very many of them, the Church was simply a racket and the priest, the boss and the landlord were all of a piece. The national church had lost its hold on them because it had failed in its job. Catholics would probably do their Church a better service by facing this fact than by tracing everything to mere wickedness, or to Moscow, which persecutes its own religious believers but has its reasons for being slightly pro-clerical elsewhere.