congestion in the great industrial centres of India like Calcutta, Bombay, and Lucknow averaged three or four times the congestion of London. And the late war has rendered the housing crisis even more acute. In the East, as in the West, the war caused a rapid drift of population to the cities and at the same time stopped building owing to the prohibitive cost of construction. Hence, a prodigious rise in rents and a plague of landlord profiteering. Says Fisher: "Rents were raised as much as 300 per cent, enforced by eviction. Mass-meetings of protest in Bombay resulted in government action, fixing maximum rents for some of the tenements occupied by artisans and laborers. Setting maximum rental does not, however, make more room." 1

And, of course, it must not be forgotten that higher rents are only one phase in a general rise in the cost of living that has been going on in the East for a generation and which has been particularly pronounced since 1914. More than a decade ago Bertrand wrote of the Near East: "From one end of the Levant to the other, at Constantinople as at Smyrna, Damascus, Beyrout, and Cairo, I heard the same complaints about the increasing cost of living; and these complaints were uttered by Europeans as well as by the natives." 2 To-day the situation is even more difficult. Says Sir Valentine Chirol of conditions in Egypt since the war: "The rise in wages, considerable as it has been, has ceased to keep pace with the inordinate rise in prices for the very necessities of life. This is particularly the case in the urban centres, where the lower classes-workmen, carters, cabdrivers, shopkeepers, and a host of minor employees2 Bertrand, p. 141.

1 Fisher, pp. 51-52.

are hard put to it nowadays to make both ends meet." 1 As a result of all these hard conditions various phenomena of social degradation such as alcoholism, vice, and crime, are becoming increasingly common. Lastbut not least-there are growing symptoms of social unrest and revolutionary agitation, which we will examine in the next chapter.

1 Sir V. Chirol, "England's Peril in Egypt," from the London Times, 1919.

2 See Bertrand and Fisher, supra.

CHAPTER IX

SOCIAL UNREST AND BOLSHEVISM

UNREST is the natural concomitant of change particularly of sudden change. Every break with past, however normal and inevitable, implies a necessity for readjustment to altered conditions which causes a temporary sense of restless disharmony until the required adjustment has been made. Unrest is not an exceptional phenomenon; it is always latent in every human society which has not fallen into complete stagnation, and a slight amount of unrest should be considered a sign of healthy growth rather than a symptom of disease. In fact, the minimum degrees of unrest are usually not called by that name, but are considered mere incidents of normal development. Under normal circumstances, indeed, the social organism functions like the human organism: it is being incessantly destroyed and as incessantly renewed in conformity with the changing conditions of life. These changes are sometimes very considerable, but they are so gradual that they are effected almost without being perceived. A healthy organism well attuned to its environment is always plastic. It instinctively senses environmental changes and adapts itself so rapidly that it escapes the injurious consequences of disharmony.

Far different is the character of unrest's acuter manifestations. These are infallible symptoms of sweeping changes, sudden breaks with the past, and profound maladjustments which are not being rapidly rectified.

In other words, acute unrest denotes social ill health and portends the possibility of one of those violent crises known as "revolutions."

The history of the Moslem East well exemplifies the above generalizations. The formative period of Saracenic civilization was characterized by rapid change and an intense idealistic ferment. The great "Motazelite" movement embraced many shades of thought, its radical wing professing religious, political, and social doctrines of a violent, revolutionary nature. But this changeful period was superficial and brief. Arab vigor and the Islamic spirit proved unable permanently to leaven the vast inertia of the ancient East. Soon the old traditions reasserted themselves-somewhat modified, to be sure, yet basically the same. Saracenic civilization became stereotyped, ossified, and with this ossification changeful unrest died away. Here and there the radical tradition was preserved and secretly handed down by a few obscure sects like the Kharidjites of Inner Arabia and the Bektashi dervishes; but these were mere cryptic episodes, of no general significance.

With the Mohammedan Revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, symptoms of social unrest appeared once more. Wahabism aimed not merely at a reform of religious abuses but was also a general protest against the contemporary decadence of Moslem society. In many cases it took the form of a popular revolt against established governments. The same was true of the correlative Babbist movement in Persia, which took place about the same time.1

1 For these early forms of unrest, see A. Le Chatelier, L'Islam au dizneuvième Siècle, pp. 22-44 (Paris, 1888).

And of course these nascent stirrings were greatly stimulated by the flood of Western ideas and methods which, as the nineteenth century wore on, increasingly permeated the East. What, indeed, could be more provocative of unrest of every description than the resulting transformation of the Orient-a transformation so sudden, so intense, and necessitating so concentrated a process of adaptation that it was basically revolutionary rather than evolutionary in its nature? The details of these profound changes-political, religious, economic, social-we have already studied, together with the equally profound disturbance, bewilderment, and suffering afflicting all classes in this eminently transition period.

The essentially revolutionary nature of this transition period, as exemplified by India, is well described by a British economist.1 What, he asks, could be more anachronistic than the contrast between rural and urban India? "Rural India is primitive or mediæval; city India is modern." In city India you will find every symbol of Western life, from banks and factories down to the very "sandwichmen that you left in the London gutters." Now all this coexists beside rural India. "And it is surely a fact unique in economic history that they should thus exist side by side. The present condition of India does not correspond with any period of European economic history." Imagine the effect in Europe of setting down modern and mediæval men together, with utterly disparate ideas. That has not happened in Europe because "European progress in the

1D. H. Dodwell, "Economic Transition in India," Economic Journal, December, 1910.