SOCIAL CHANGE
The momentous nature of the contemporary transformation of the Orient is
nowhere better attested than by the changes effected in the lives of its
peoples. That dynamic influence of the West which is modifying
governmental forms, political concepts, religious beliefs, and economic
processes is proving equally potent in the range of social phenomena. In
the third chapter of this volume we attempted a general survey of
Western influence along all the above lines. In the present chapter we
shall attempt a detailed consideration of the social changes which are
to-day taking place.
These social changes are very great, albeit many of them may not be so
apparent as the changes in other fields. So firm is the hold of custom
and tradition on individual, family, and group life in the Orient that
superficial observers of the East are prone to assert that these matters
are still substantially unaltered, however pronounced may have been the
changes on the external, material side. Yet such is not the opinion of
the closest students of the Orient, and it is most emphatically not the
opinion of Orientals themselves. These generally stress the profound
social changes which are going on.
And it is their judgments which seem to be the more correct. To say that
the East is advancing "materially" but standing still "socially" is to
ignore the elemental truth that social systems are altered quite as much
by material things as by abstract ideas. Who that looks below the
surface can deny the social, moral, and civilizing power of railroads,
post-offices, and telegraph lines? Does it mean nothing socially as well
as materially that the East is adopting from the West a myriad
innovations, weighty and trivial, important and frivolous, useful and
baneful? Does it mean nothing socially as well as materially that the
Prophet's tomb at Medina is lit by electricity and that picture
post-cards are sold outside the Holy Kaaba at Mecca? It may seem mere
grotesque piquancy that the muezzin should ride to the mosque in a
tram-car, or that the Moslem business man should emerge from his harem,
read his morning paper, motor to an office equipped with a prayer-rug,
and turn from his devotions to dictaphone and telephone. Yet why assume
that his life is moulded by mosque, harem, and prayer-rug, and yet deny
the things of the West a commensurate share in the shaping of his social
existence? Now add to these tangible innovations intangible novelties
like scientific education, Occidental amusements, and the partial
emancipation of women, and we begin to get some idea of the depth and
scope of the social transformation which is going on.
In those parts of the Orient most open to Western influences this social
transformation has attained notable proportions for more than a
generation. When the Hungarian Orientalist Vambéry returned to
Constantinople in 1896 after forty years' absence, he stood amazed at
the changes which had taken place, albeit Constantinople was then
subjected to the worst repression of the Hamidian régime. "I had," he
writes, "continually to ask myself this question: Is it possible that
these are my Turks of 1856; and how can all these transformations have
taken place? I was astonished at the aspect of the city; at the stone
buildings which had replaced the old wooden ones; at the animation of
the streets, in which carriages and tram-cars abounded, whereas forty
years before only saddle-animals were used; and when the strident shriek
of the locomotive mingled with the melancholy calls from the minarets,
all that I saw and heard seemed to me a living protest against the old
adage: 'La bidaat fil Islam'--'There is nothing to reform in Islam.' My
astonishment became still greater when I entered the houses and was able
to appreciate the people, not only by their exteriors but still more by
their manner of thought. The effendi class[239] of Constantinople seemed
to me completely transformed in its conduct, outlook, and attitude
toward foreigners."[240]
Vambéry stresses the inward as well as outward evolution of the Turkish
educated classes, for he says: "Not only in his outward aspect, but also
in his home-life, the present-day Turk shows a strong inclination to the
manners and habits of the West, in such varied matters as furniture,
table-manners, sex-relations, and so forth. This is of the very greatest
significance. For a people may, to be sure, assimilate foreign
influences in the intellectual field, if it be persuaded of their
utility and advantage; but it gives up with more difficulty customs and
habits which are in the blood. One cannot over-estimate the numerous
sacrifices which, despite everything, the Turks have made in this line.
I find all Turkish society, even the Mollahs,[241] penetrated with the
necessity of a union with Western civilization. Opinions may differ as
to the method of assimilation: some wish to impress on the foreign
civilization a national character; others, on the contrary, are
partisans of our intellectual culture, such as it is, and reprobate any
kind of modification."[242]
Most significant of all, Vambéry found even the secluded women of the
harems, "those bulwarks of obscurantism," notably changed. "Yes, I
repeat, the life of women in Turkey seems to me to have been radically
transformed in the last forty years, and it cannot be denied that this
transformation has been produced by internal conviction as much as by
external pressure." Noting the spread of female education, and the
increasing share of women in reform movements, Vambéry remarks: "This is
of vital importance, for when women shall begin to act in the family as
a factor of modern progress, real reforms, in society as well as in the
state, cannot fail to appear."[243]
In India a similar permeation of social life by Westernism is depicted
by the Moslem liberal, S. Khuda Bukhsh, albeit Mr. Bukhsh, being an
insider, lays greater emphasis upon the painful aspects of the
inevitable transition process from old to new. He is not unduly
pessimistic, for he recognizes that "the age of transition is
necessarily to a certain extent an age of laxity of morals, indifference
to religion, superficial culture, and gossiping levity. These are
passing ills which time itself will cure." Nevertheless, he does not
minimize the critical aspects of the present situation, which implies
nothing less than the breakdown of the old social system. "The clearest
result of this breakdown of our old system of domestic life and social
customs under the assault of European ideas," he says, "is to be found
in two directions--in our religious beliefs and in our social life. The
old system, with all its faults, had many redeeming virtues." To-day
this old system, narrow-minded but God-fearing, has been replaced by a
"strange independence of thought and action. Reverence for age, respect
for our elders, deference to the opinions of others, are fast
disappearing.... Under the older system the head of the family was the
sole guide and friend of its members. His word had the force of law. He
was, so to speak, the custodian of the honour and prestige of the
family. From this exalted position he is now dislodged, and the most
junior member now claims equality with him."[244]
Mr. Bukhsh deplores the current wave of extravagance, due to the
wholesale adoption of European customs and modes of living. "What," he
asks, "has happened here in India? We have adopted European costume,
European ways of living, even the European vices of drinking and
gambling, but none of their virtues. This must be remedied. We must
learn at the feet of Europe, but not at the sacrifice of our Eastern
individuality. But this is precisely what we have not done. We have
dabbled a little in English and European history, and we have commenced
to despise our religion, our literature, our history, our traditions. We
have unlearned the lessons of our history and our civilization, and in
their place we have secured nothing solid and substantial to hold
society fast in the midst of endless changes." In fine: "Destruction has
done its work, but the work of construction has not yet begun."[245]
Like Vambéry, Bukhsh lays strong emphasis on the increasing emancipation
of women. No longer regarded as mere "child-bearing machines," the
Mohammedan women of India "are getting educated day by day, and now
assert their rights. Though the purdah system[246] still prevails, it is
no longer that severe, stringent, and unreasonable seclusion of women
which existed fifty years ago. It is gradually relaxing, and women are
getting, step by step, rights and liberties which must in course of time
end in the complete emancipation of Eastern womanhood. Forty years ago
women meekly submitted to neglect, indifference, and even harsh
treatment from their husbands, but such is the case no longer."[247]
These two descriptions of social conditions in the Near and Middle East
respectively enable one to get a fair idea of the process of change
which is going on. Of course it must not be forgotten that both writers
deal primarily with the educated upper classes of the large towns.
Nevertheless, the leaven is working steadily downward, and with every
decade is affecting wider strata of the native populations.
The spread of Western education in the East during the past few decades
has been truly astonishing, because it is the exact antithesis of the
Oriental educational system. The traditional "education" of the entire
Orient, from Morocco to China, was a mere memorizing of sacred texts
combined with exercises of religious devotion. The Mohammedan or Hindu
student spent long years reciting to his master (a "holy man")
interminable passages from books which, being written in classic Arabic
or Sanskrit, were unintelligible to him, so that he usually did not
understand a word of what he was saying. No more deadening system for
the intellect could possibly have been devised. Every part of the brain
except the memory atrophied, and the wonder is that any intellectual
initiative or original thinking ever appeared.
Even to-day the old system persists, and millions of young Orientals are
still wasting their time at this mind-petrifying nonsense. But alongside
the old there has arisen a new system, running the whole educational
gamut from kindergartens to universities, where Oriental youth is being
educated along Western lines. These new-type educational establishments
are of every kind. Besides schools and universities giving a liberal
education and fitting students for government service or the
professions, there are numerous technical schools turning out skilled
agriculturists or engineers, while good normal schools assure a supply
of teachers qualified to instruct coming student-generations. Both
public and private effort furthers Western education in the East. All
the European governments have favoured Western education in the lands
under their control, particularly the British in India and Egypt, while
various Christian missionary bodies have covered the East with a
network of schools and colleges. Also many Oriental governments like
Turkey and the native states of India have made sincere efforts to
spread Western education among their peoples.[248]
Of course, as in any new development, the results so far obtained are
far from ideal. The vicious traditions of the past handicap or partially
pervert the efforts of the present. Eastern students are prone to use
their memories rather than their intellects, and seek to cram their way
quickly through examinations to coveted posts rather than acquire
knowledge and thus really fit themselves for their careers. The result
is that many fail, and these unfortunates, half-educated and spoiled for
any sort of useful occupation, vegetate miserably, come to hate that
Westernism which they do not understand, and give themselves up to
anarchistic revolutionary agitation. Sir Alfred Lyall well describes the
dark side of Western education in the East when he says of India:
"Ignorance is unquestionably the root of many evils; and it was natural
that in the last century certain philosophers should have assumed
education to be a certain cure for human delusions; and that statesmen
like Macaulay should have declared education to be the best and surest
remedy for political discontent and for law-breaking. In any case, it
was the clear and imperative duty of the British Government to attempt
the intellectual emancipation of India as the best justification of
British rule. We have since discovered by experience, that, although
education is a sovereign remedy for many ills--is indeed indispensable
to healthy progress--yet an indiscriminate or superficial administration
of this potent medicine may engender other disorders. It acts upon the
frame of an antique society as a powerful dissolvent, heating weak
brains, stimulating rash ambitions, raising inordinate expectations of
which the disappointment is bitterly resented."[249]
Indeed, some Western observers of the Orient, particularly colonial
officials, have been so much impressed by the political and social
dangers arising from the existence of this "literate proletariat" of
semi-educated failures that they are tempted to condemn the whole
venture of Western education in the East as a mistake. Lord Cromer, for
example, was decidedly sceptical of the worth of the Western-educated
Egyptian,[250] while a prominent Anglo-Indian official names as the
chief cause of Indian unrest, "the system of education, which we
ourselves introduced--advisedly so far as the limited vision went of
those responsible; blindly in view of the inevitable consequences."[251]
Yet these pessimistic judgments do not seem to make due allowance for
the inescapable evils attendant on any transition stage. Other observers
of the Orient have made due allowance for this factor. Vambéry, for
instance, notes the high percentage of honest and capable native
officials in the British Indian and French North African civil service
(the bulk of these officials, of course, Western-educated men), and
concludes: "Strictly conservative Orientals, and also fanatically
inclined Europeans, think that with the entrance of our culture the
primitive virtues of the Asiatics have been destroyed, and that the
uncivilized Oriental was more faithful, more honest, and more reliable
than the Asiatic educated on European principles. This is a gross error.
It may be true of the half-educated, but not of the Asiatic in whose
case the intellectual evolution is founded on the solid basis of a
thorough, systematic education."[252]
And, whatever may be the ills attendant upon Western education in the
East, is it not the only practicable course to pursue? The impact of
Westernism upon the Orient is too ubiquitous to be confined to books.
Granting, therefore, for the sake of argument, that colonial governments
could have prevented Western education in the formal sense, would not
the Oriental have learned in other ways? Surely it is better that he
should learn through good texts under the supervision of qualified
teachers, rather than tortuously in perverted--and more
dangerous--fashion.
The importance of Western education in the East is nowhere better
illustrated than in the effects it is producing in ameliorating the
status of women. The depressed condition of women throughout the Orient
is too well known to need elaboration. Bad enough in Mohammedan
countries, it is perhaps at its worst among the Hindus of India, with
child-marriage, the virtual enslavement of widows (burned alive till
prohibited by English law), and a seclusion more strict even than that
of the "harem" of Moslem lands. As an English writer well puts it:
"'Ladies first,' we say in the West; in the East it is 'ladies last.'
That sums up succinctly the difference in the domestic ideas of the two
civilizations."[253]
Under these circumstances it might seem as though no breath of the West
could yet have reached these jealously secluded creatures. Yet, as a
matter of fact, Western influences have already profoundly affected the
women of the upper classes, and female education, while far behind that
of the males, has attained considerable proportions. In the more
advanced parts of the Orient like Constantinople, Cairo, and the cities
of India, distinctly "modern" types of women have appeared, the
self-supporting, self-respecting--and respected--woman school-teacher
being especially in evidence.
The social consequences of this rising status of women, not only to
women themselves but also to the community at large, are very important.
In the East the harem is, as Vambéry well says, the "bulwark of
obscurantism."[254] Ignorant and fanatical herself, the harem woman
implants her ignorance and fanaticism in her sons as well as in her
daughters. What could be a worse handicap for the Eastern "intellectual"
than his boyhood years spent "behind the veil"? No wonder that
enlightened Oriental fathers have been in the habit of sending their
boys to school at the earliest possible age in order to get them as soon
as possible out of the stultifying atmosphere of harem life. Yet even
this has proved merely a palliative. Childhood impressions are ever the
most lasting, and so long as one-half of the Orient remained untouched
by progressive influences Oriental progress had to be begun again _de
novo_ with every succeeding generation.
The increasing number of enlightened Oriental women is remedying this
fatal defect. As a Western writer well says: "Give the mothers education
and the whole situation is transformed. Girls who are learning other
things than the unintelligible phrases of the Koran are certain to
impart such knowledge, as daughters, sisters, and mothers, to their
respective households. Women who learn housewifery, methods of modern
cooking, sewing, and sanitation in the domestic-economy schools, are
bound to cast about the home upon their return the atmosphere of a
civilized community. The old-time picture of the Oriental woman spending
her hours upon divans, eating sweetmeats, and indulging in petty and
degrading gossip with the servants, or with women as ignorant as
herself, will be changed. The new woman will be a companion rather than
a slave or a toy of her husband. Marriage will advance from the stage of
a paltry trade in bodies to something like a real union, involving
respect towards the woman by both sons and fathers, while in a new pride
of relationship the woman herself will be discovered."[255]
These men and women of the newer Orient reflect their changing ideas in
their changing standards of living. Although this is most evident among
the wealthier elements of the towns, it is perceptible in all classes of
the population. Rich and poor, urban and rural, the Orientals are
altering their living standards towards those of the West. And this
involves social changes of the most far-reaching character, because few
antitheses could be sharper than the living conditions prevailing
respectively in the traditional East and in the modern Western world.
This basic difference lies, not in wealth (the East, like the West,
knows great riches as well as great poverty), but rather in
_comfort_--using the word in its broad sense. The wealthy Oriental of
the old school spends most of his money on Oriental luxuries, like fine
raiment, jewels, women, horses, and a great retinue of attendants, and
then hoards the rest. But of "comfort," in the Western sense, he knows
virtually nothing, and it is safe to say that he lives under domestic
conditions which a Western artisan would despise.[256]
To-day, however, the Oriental is discovering "comfort." And, high or
low, he likes it very well. All the myriad things which make our lives
easier and more agreeable--lamps, electric light, sewing-machines,
clocks, whisky, umbrellas, sanitary plumbing, and a thousand others: all
these things, which to us are more or less matters of course, are to the
Oriental so many delightful discoveries, of irresistible appeal. He
wants them, and he gets them in ever-increasing quantities. But this
produces some rather serious complications. His private economy is more
or less thrown out of gear. This opening of a whole vista of new wants
means a portentous rise in his standard of living. And where is he going
to find the money to pay for it? If he be poor, he has to skimp on his
bare necessities. If he be rich, he hates to forgo his traditional
luxuries. The upshot is a universal growth of extravagance. And, in this
connection, it is well to bear in mind that the peoples of the Near and
Middle East, taken as a whole, have never been really thrifty. Poor the
masses may have been, and thus obliged to live frugally, but they have
always proved themselves "good spenders" when opportunity offers. The
way in which a Turkish peasant or a Hindu ryot will squander his savings
and run into debt over festivals, marriages, funerals, and other social
events is astounding to Western observers.[257] Now add to all this the
fact that in the Orient, as in the rest of the world, the cost of the
basic necessaries of life--food, clothing, fuel, and shelter, has risen
greatly during the past two decades, and we can realize the gravity of
the problem which higher Oriental living-standards involves.[258]
Certain it is that the struggle for existence is growing keener and that
the pressure of poverty is getting more severe. With the basic
necessaries rising in price, and with many things considered necessities
which were considered luxuries or entirely unheard of a generation ago,
the Oriental peasant or town working-man is finding it harder and harder
to make both ends meet. As one writer well phrases it: "These altered
economic conditions have not as yet brought the ability to meet them.
The cost of living has increased faster than the resources of the
people."[259]
One of the main (though not sufficiently recognized) causes of the
economic-social crisis through which the Orient is to-day passing is
over-population. The quick breeding tendencies of Oriental peoples have
always been proverbial, and have been due not merely to strong sexual
appetites but also to economic reasons like the harsh exploitation of
women and children, and perhaps even more to religious doctrines
enjoining early marriage and the begetting of numerous sons. As a
result, Oriental populations have always pressed close upon the limits
of subsistence. In the past, however, this pressure was automatically
lightened by factors like war, misgovernment, pestilence, and famine,
which swept off such multitudes of people that, despite high
birth-rates, populations remained at substantially a fixed level. But
here, as in every other phase of Eastern life, Western influences have
radically altered the situation. The extension of European political
control over Eastern lands has meant the putting down of internal
strife, the diminution of governmental abuses, the decrease of disease,
and the lessening of the blight of famine. In other words, those
"natural" checks which previously kept down the population have been
diminished or abolished, and in response to the life-saving activities
of the West, the enormous death-rate which in the past has kept Oriental
populations from excessive multiplication is falling to proportions
comparable with the low death-rate of Western nations. But to lower the
Orient's prodigious birth-rate is quite another matter. As a matter of
fact, that birth-rate keeps up with undiminished vigour, and the
consequence has been a portentous increase of population in nearly every
portion of the Orient under Western political control. In fact, even
those Oriental countries which have maintained their independence have
more or less adopted Western life-conserving methods, and have
experienced in greater or less degree an accelerated increase of
population.
The phenomena of over-population are best seen in India. Most of India
has been under British control for the greater part of a century. Even a
century ago, India was densely populated, yet in the intervening
hundred years the population has increased between two and three
fold.[260] Of course, factors like improved agriculture, irrigation,
railways, and the introduction of modern industry enable India to
support a much larger population than it could have done at the time of
the British Conquest. Nevertheless, the evidence is clear that excessive
multiplication has taken place. Nearly all qualified students of the
problem concur on this point. Forty years ago the Duke of Argyll stated:
"Where there is no store, no accumulation, no wealth; where the people
live from hand to mouth from season to season on a low diet; and where,
nevertheless, they breed and multiply at such a rate; there we can at
least see that this power and force of multiplication is no evidence
even of safety, far less of comfort." Towards the close of the last
century, Sir William Hunter termed population India's "fundamental
problem," and continued: "The result of civilized rule in India has been
to produce a strain on the food-producing powers of the country such as
it had never before to bear. It has become a truism of Indian statistics
that the removal of the old cruel checks on population in an Asiatic
country is by no means an unmixed blessing to an Asiatic people."[261]
Lord Cromer remarks of India's poverty: "Not only cannot it be remedied
by mere philanthropy, but it is absolutely certain--cruel and
paradoxical though it may appear to say so--that philanthropy enhances
the evil. In the days of Akhbar or Shah Jehan, cholera, famine, and
internal strife kept down the population. Only the fittest survived. Now
internal strife is forbidden, and philanthropy steps in and says that no
single life shall be sacrificed if science and Western energy or skill
can save it. Hence the growth of a highly congested population, vast
numbers of whom are living on a bare margin of subsistence. The fact
that one of the greatest difficulties of governing the teeming masses of
the East is caused by good and humane government should be recognized.
It is too often ignored."[262]
William Archer well states the matter when, in answer to the query why
improved external conditions have not brought India prosperity, he says:
"The reason, in my view, is simple: namely, that the benefit of good
government is, in part at any rate, nullified, when the people take
advantage of it, not to save and raise their standard of living, but to
breed to the very margin of subsistence. Henry George used to point out
that every mouth that came into the world brought two hands along with
it; but though the physiological fact is undeniable, the economic
deduction suggested will not hold good except in conditions that permit
of the profitable employment of the two hands.... If mouths increase in
a greater ratio than food, the tendency must be towards greater
poverty."[263]
It is one of the most unfortunate aspects of the situation that very few
Oriental thinkers yet realize that over-population is a prime cause of
Oriental poverty. Almost without exception they lay the blame to
political factors, especially to Western political control. In fact, the
only case that I know of where an Eastern thinker has boldly faced the
problem and has courageously advocated birth-control is in the book
published five years ago by P. K. Wattal, a native official of the
Indian Finance Department, entitled, _The Population Problem of
India_.[264] This pioneer volume is written with such ability and is of
such apparent significance as an indication of the awakening of
Orientals to a more rational attitude, that it merits special attention.
Mr. Wattal begins his book by a plea to his fellow-countrymen to look at
the problem rationally and without prejudice. "This essay," he says,
"should not be constituted into an attack on the spiritual civilization
of our country, or even indirectly into a glorification of the
materialism of the West. The object in view is that we should take a
somewhat more matter-of-fact view of the main problem of life, viz., how
to live in this world. We are a poor people; the fact is indisputable.
Our poverty is, perhaps, due to a great many causes. But I put it to
every one of us whether he has not at some of the most momentous periods
of his life been handicapped by having to support a large family, and
whether this encumbrance has not seriously affected the chances of
advancement warranted by early promise and exceptional endowment. This
question should be viewed by itself. It is a physical fact, and has
nothing to do with political environment or religious obligation. If we
have suffered from the consequences of that mistake, is it not a duty
that we owe to ourselves and to our progeny that its evil effects shall
be mitigated as far as possible? There is no greater curse than
poverty--I say this with due respect to our spiritualism. It is not in a
spirit of reproach that restraint in married life is urged in these
pages. It is solely from a vivid realization of the hardships caused by
large families and a profound sympathy with the difficulties under which
large numbers of respectable persons struggle through life in this
country that I have made bold to speak in plain terms what comes to
every young man, but which he does not care to give utterance to in a
manner that would prevent the recurrence of the evil."[265]
After this appeal to reason in his readers, Mr. Wattal develops his
thesis. The first prime cause of over-population in India, he asserts,
is early marriage. Contrary to Western lands, where population is kept
down by prudential marriages and by birth-control, "for the Hindus
marriage is a sacrament which must be performed, regardless of the
fitness of the parties to bear the responsibilities of a mated
existence. A Hindu male must marry and beget children--sons, if you
please--to perform his funeral rites lest his spirit wander uneasily in
the waste places of the earth. The very name of son, 'putra,' means one
who saves his father's soul from the hell called Puta. A Hindu maiden
unmarried at puberty is a source of social obloquy to her family and of
damnation to her ancestors. Among the Mohammedans, who are not
handicapped by such penalties, the married state is equally common,
partly owing to Hindu example and partly to the general conditions of
primitive society, where a wife is almost a necessity both as a domestic
drudge and as a helpmate in field work."[266] The worst of the matter is
that, despite the efforts of social reformers child-marriage seems to be
increasing. The census of 1911 showed that during the decade 1901-10 the
numbers of married females per 1000 of ages 0-5 years rose from 13 to
14; of ages 5-10 from 102 to 105; of 10-15 from 423 to 430, and of 15-20
from 770 to 800. In other words, in the year 1911, out of every 1000
Indian girls, over one-tenth were married before they were 10 years old,
nearly one-half before they were 15, and four-fifths before they were
20.[267]
The result of all this is a tremendous birth-rate, but this is "no
matter for congratulation. We have heard so often of our high death-rate
and the means for combating it, but can it be seriously believed that
with a birth-rate of 30 per 1000 it is possible to go on as we are doing
with the death-rate brought down to the level of England or Scotland? Is
there room enough in the country for the population to increase so fast
as 20 per 1000 every year? We are paying the inevitable penalty of
bringing into this world more persons than can be properly cared for,
and therefore if we wish fewer deaths to occur in this country the
births must be reduced to the level of the countries where the
death-rate is low. It is, therefore, our high birth-rate that is the
social danger; the high death-rate, however regrettable, is merely an
incident of our high birth-rate."[268]
Mr. Wattal then describes the cruel items in India's death-rate; the
tremendous female mortality, due largely to too early childbirth, and
the equally terrible infant mortality, nearly 50 per cent. of infant
deaths being due to premature birth or debility at birth. These are the
inevitable penalties of early and universal marriage. For, in India,
"everybody marries, fit or unfit, and is a parent at the earliest
possible age permitted by nature." This process is highly disgenic; it
is plainly lowering the quality and sapping the vigour of the race. It
is the lower elements of the population, the negroid aboriginal tribes
and the Pariahs or Outcastes, who are gaining the fastest. Also the
vitality of the whole population seems to be lowering. The census
figures show that the number of elderly persons is decreasing, and that
the average statistical expectation of life is falling. "The coming
generation is severely handicapped at start in life. And the chances of
living to a good old age are considerably smaller than they were, say
thirty or forty years ago. Have we ever paused to consider what it means
to us in the life of the nation as a whole? It means that the people who
alone by weight of experience and wisdom are fitted for the posts of
command in the various public activities of the country are snatched
away by death; and that the guidance and leadership which belongs to age
and mature judgment in the countries of the West fall in India to
younger and consequently to less trustworthy persons."[269]
After warning his fellow-countrymen that neither improved methods of
agriculture, the growth of industry, nor emigration can afford any real
relief to the growing pressure of population on means of subsistence, he
notes a few hopeful signs that, despite the hold of religion and
custom, the people are beginning to realize the situation and that in
certain parts of India there are foreshadowings of birth-control. For
example, he quotes from the census report for 1901 this official
explanation of a slight drop in the birth-rate of Bengal: "The
postponement of the age of marriage cannot wholly account for the
diminished rate of reproduction. The deliberate avoidance of
child-bearing must also be partly responsible.... It is a matter of
common belief that among the tea-garden coolies of Assam means are
frequently taken to prevent conception, or to procure abortion." And the
report of the Sanitary Commissioner of Assam for 1913 states: "An
important factor in producing the defective birth-rate appears to be due
to voluntary limitation of birth."[270]
However, these beginnings of birth-control are too local and partial to
afford any immediate relief to India's growing over-population. Wider
appreciation of the situation and prompt action are needed. "The
conclusion is irresistible. We can no longer afford to shut our eyes to
the social canker in our midst. In the land of the bullock-cart, the
motor has come to stay. The competition is now with the more advanced
races of the West, and we cannot tell them what Diogenes said to
Alexander: 'Stand out of my sunshine.' After the close of this gigantic
World War theories of population will perhaps be revised and a reversion
in favour of early marriage and larger families may be counted upon.
But, (1) that will be no solution to our own population problem, and (2)
this reaction will be only for a time.... The law of population may be
arrested in its operation, but there is no way of escaping it."[271]
So concludes this striking little book. Furthermore, we must remember
that, although India may be the acutest sufferer from over-population,
conditions in the entire Orient are basically the same, prudential
checks and rational birth-control being everywhere virtually
absent.[272] Remembering also that, besides over-population, there are
other economic and social evils previously discussed, we cannot be
surprised to find in all Eastern lands much acute poverty and social
degradation.
Both the rural and urban masses usually live on the bare
margin of subsistence. The English economist Brailsford thus describes
the condition of the Egyptian peasantry: "The villages exhibited a
poverty such as I have never seen even in the mountains of anarchical
Macedonia or among the bogs of Donegal.... The villages are crowded
slums of mud hovels, without a tree, a flower, or a garden. The huts,
often without a window or a levelled floor, are minute dungeons of baked
mud, usually of two small rooms neither whitewashed nor carpeted. Those
which I entered were bare of any visible property, save a few cooking
utensils, a mat to serve as a bed, and a jar which held the staple food
of maize."[273] As for the poorer Indian peasants, a British sanitary
official thus depicts their mode of life: "One has actually to see the
interior of the houses, in which each family is often compelled to live
in a single small cell, made of mud walls and with a mud floor;
containing small yards littered with rubbish, often crowded with cattle;
possessing wells permeated by rain soaking through this filthy surface;
and frequently jumbled together in inchoate masses called towns and
cities."[274]
In the cities, indeed, conditions are even worse than in the country,
the slums of the Orient surpassing the slums of the West. The French
publicist Louis Bertrand paints positively nauseating pictures of the
poorer quarters of the great Levantine towns like Cairo, Constantinople,
and Jerusalem. Omitting his more poignant details, here is his
description of a Cairo tenement: "In Cairo, as elsewhere in Egypt, the
wretchedness and grossness of the poorer-class dwellings are perhaps
even more shocking than in the other Eastern lands. Two or three dark,
airless rooms usually open on a hall-way not less obscure. The plaster,
peeling off from the ceilings and the worm-eaten laths of the walls,
falls constantly to the filthy floors. The straw mats and bedding are
infested by innumerable vermin."[275]
In India it is the same story. Says Fisher: "Even before the growth of
her industries had begun, the cities of India presented a baffling
housing problem. Into the welter of crooked streets and unsanitary
habits of an Oriental city these great industrial plants are wedging
their thousands of employees. Working from before dawn until after dark,
men and women are too exhausted to go far from the plant to sleep, if
they can help it. When near-by houses are jammed to suffocation, they
live and sleep in the streets. In Calcutta, twenty years ago,[276] land
had reached $200,000 an acre in the overcrowded tenement
districts."[277] Of Calcutta, a Western writer remarks: "Calcutta is a
shame even in the East. In its slums, mill hands and dock coolies do not
live; they pig. Houses choke with unwholesome breath; drains and
compounds fester in filth. Wheels compress decaying refuse in the roads;
cows drink from wells soaked with sewage, and the floors of bakeries are
washed in the same pollution."[278] In the other industrial centres of
India, conditions are practically the same. A Bombay native sanitary
official stated in a report on the state of the tenement district, drawn
up in 1904: "In such houses--the breeders of germs and bacilli, the
centres of disease and poverty, vice, and crime--have people of all
kinds, the diseased, the dissolute, the drunken, the improvident, been
indiscriminately herded and tightly packed in vast hordes to dwell in
close association with each other."[279]
Furthermore, urban conditions seem to be getting worse rather than
better. The problem of congestion, in particular, is assuming ever
graver proportions. Already in the opening years of the present century
the 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 labourers. Setting maximum
rental does not, however, make more room."[280]
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."[281] 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, cab-drivers, shopkeepers, and a host
off minor employees--are hard put to it nowadays to make both ends
meet."[282] As a result of all these hard conditions various phenomena
of social degradation such as alcoholism, vice, and crime, are becoming
increasingly common.[283] Last--but not least--there are growing
symptoms of social unrest and revolutionary agitation, which we will
examine in the next chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[239] _I. e._ the educated upper class.
[240] Vambéry, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.
13.
[241] _I. e._ the priestly class.
[242] Vambéry, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.
15.
[243] Vambéry, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.
51.
[244] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, pp. 221-226.
[245] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, p. 240.
[246] The purdah is the curtain separating the women's apartments from
the rest of the house.
[247] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, pp. 254-255.
[248] For progress in Western education in the Orient, under both
European and native auspices, see L. Bertrand, _Le Mirage oriental_, pp.
291-392; C. S. Cooper, _The Modernizing of the Orient_, pp. 3-13, 24-64.
[249] In his Introduction to Sir Valentine Chirol's _Indian Unrest_, p.
xii.
[250] Cromer, _Modern Egypt_, Vol. II., pp. 228-243.
[251] J. D. Rees, _The Real India_, p. 162 (London, 1908).
[252] Vambéry, _Western Culture in Eastern Lands_, pp. 203-204.
[253] H. E. Compton, _Indian Life in Town and Country_, p. 98 (London,
1904).
[254] Vambéry, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p.
32.
[255] Cooper, _op. cit._, pp. 48-49.
[256] On this point of comfort _v._ luxury, see especially Sir Bampfylde
Fuller, "East and West: A Study of Differences," _Nineteenth Century and
After_, November, 1911.
[257] L. Bertrand, _op. cit._, 145-147; J. Chailley, _Administrative
Problems of British India_, pp. 138-139. For increased expenditure on
Western products, see A. J. Brown, "Economic Changes in Asia," _The
Century_, March, 1904; J. P. Jones, "The Present Situation in India,"
_Journal of Race Development_, July, 1910; R. Mukerjee, _The Foundations
of Indian Economics_, p. 5.
[258] For higher cost of living in the East, see Chirol, _Indian
Unrest_, pp. 2-3; Fisher, _India's Silent Revolution_, pp. 46-60; Jones,
_op. cit._; T. T. Williams, "Inquiry into the Rise of Prices in India,"
_Economic Journal_, December, 1915.
[259] Brown, _op. cit._
[260] At the beginning of the nineteenth century the population of India
is roughly estimated to have been about 100,000,000. According to the
census of 1911 the population was 315,000,000.
[261] Sir W. W. Hunter, _The India of the Queen and Other Essays_, p. 42
(London, 1903).
[262] Cromer, "Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia,"
_Nineteenth Century and After_, May, 1913.
[263] Archer, _India and the Future_, pp. 157, 162 (London), 1918.
[264] P. K. Wattal, of the Indian Finance Department, Assistant
Accountant-General. The book was published at Bombay, 1916.
[265] Wattal, pp. i-iii.
[266] Wattal, p. 3.
[267] _Ibid._, p. 12.
[268] Wattal, p. 14.
[269] _Ibid._, pp. 19-21.
[270] Wattal, p. 28.
[271] _Ibid._, p. 82.
[272] For conditions in the Near East, see Bertrand, pp. 110, 124,
125-128.
[273] H. N. Brailsford, _The War of Steel and Gold_, pp. 112-113. See
also T. Rothstein, _Egypt's Ruin_, pp. 298-300 (London, 1910), Sir W. W.
Ramsay, "The Turkish Peasantry of Anatolia," _Quarterly Review_,
January, 1918.
[274] Dr. D. Ross, "Wretchedness a Cause of Political Unrest," _The
Survey_, February 18, 1911.
[275] Bertrand, _op. cit._, pp. 111-112.
[276] _I. e._, in 1900.
[277] Fisher, _India's Silent Revolution_, p. 51.
[278] G. W. Stevens, _In India_. Quoted by Fisher, p. 51.
[279] Dr. Bhalchandra Krishna. Quoted by A. Yusuf Ali, _Life and Labour
in India_, p. 35 (London, 1907).
[280] Fisher, pp. 51-52.
[281] Bertrand, p. 141.
[282] Sir V. Chirol, "England's Peril in Egypt," from the London
_Times_, 1919.
[283] See Bertrand and Fisher, _supra_.