to produce iron and steel, until the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, when blast furnaces were introduced. When Arizmendiarrieta arrived to the depressed post-war Mondragon in 1941, the largest company was the “Locksmith S.A.”, created in 1906 from the merger of the companies “Vergarajauregui, Resusta y Cia”, from 1869, and “The Guipuzcoan Locksmith”, from 1901. It had 850 employees at its foundry and machining plants in Mondragon and Bergara, was listed on the Stock Exchange of Madrid, and was the driving force behind several smaller locksmith companies. In mid-1948 it had 2,000 workers. The second most important company in Mondragon was the “Modern Locksmith ELMA”, with more than 300 employees. In all the towns of the Deba Valley there were numerous small industrial companies, among which two medium-sized ones stood out. In Bergara was "La Algodonera San Antonio, S.A.", created in 1846, which had 500 employees and was dedicated to the production of large-scale textiles. In Oñati there was "Hijos de Juan de Garay, S.A.", created in 1864, and dedicated to the production of welded steel tubes, with 400 employees. Ideological Arizmendiarrieta always had a small and austere office in the Professional School, and he was an inveterate reader of unusual topics for a modest priest, such as books by the Labour Party, or the "red bishops" such as Antonio Pildain and Vicente Enrique y Tarancon, or the new Catholic intellectuals of the Spanish Episcopal Conference Ecclesia, such as Iribarren and Rodríguez de Yrre, or the communist manifesto of Marx and Engels. The "own thought" that he began to elaborate was the conjunction between the classical and social-Catholic sources of the Seminary, and the new socialist and personalist theories in his search for a religious solution to the social question. He bought books by thinkers gifted to influence reality, such as the active Catholic priest Hans Küng, or Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Ortega y Gasset, Jacques Leclerq and the Labor leaders, and gave copies to his disciples. For him, reading was an essential source of inspiration, and he underlined the ideas he thought were most interesting on the hundreds of books in his private library. And he rigorously wrote his reflections on "pedestrian humanism" in 10,495 files and writings. After his imprisonment during the civil war he only wrote in Spanish, and in August 1968 he began to use Basque again in the magazine TU Lankide, up to a