uses 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.