cal unrest. It is small wonder. The wonder is
that the unrest has been no greater than it is. Had India not been an
Asiatic country, she would have been in fierce revolution long ago."

The above lines were of course written in the opening years of the
twentieth century, before the world had been shattered by Armageddon and
aggressive social revolution had established itself in semi-Asiatic
Russia. But even during those pre-war years, other students of the
Orient were predicting social disturbances of increasing gravity. Said
the Hindu nationalist leader, Bipin Chandra Pal: "This so-called unrest
is not really political. It is essentially an intellectual and spiritual
upheaval, the forerunner of a mighty social revolution, with a new
organon and a new philosophy of life behind it."[286] And the French
publicist Chailley wrote of India: "There will be a series of economic
revolutions, which must necessarily produce suffering and
struggle."[287]

During this pre-war period the increased difficulty of living
conditions, together with the adoption of Western ideas of comfort and
kindred higher standards, seem to have been engendering friction between
the different strata of the Oriental population. In 1911 a British
sanitary expert assigned "wretchedness" as the root-cause of India's
political unrest. After describing the deplorable living conditions of
the Indian masses, he wrote: "It will of course be said at once that
these conditions have existed in India from time immemorial, and are no
more likely to cause unrest now than previously; but in my opinion
unrest has always existed there in a subterranean form. Moreover, in the
old days, the populace could make scarcely any comparison between their
own condition and that of more fortunate people; now they can compare
their own slums and terrible 'native quarters' with the much better
ordered cantonments, stations, and houses of the British officials and
even of their own wealthier brethren. So far as I can see, such misery
is always the fundamental cause of all popular unrest.... Seditious
meetings, political chatter, and 'aspirations' of babus and demagogues
are only the superficial manifestations of the deeper disturbance."[288]

This growing social friction was indubitably heightened by the lack of
interest of Orientals in the sufferings of all persons not bound to them
by family, caste, or customary ties. Throughout the East, "social
service," in the Western sense, i