es 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. Ho