h it can organize
itself."[294]

Turning to the Near East--more than a decade ago a French Socialist
writer, observing the hard living conditions of the Egyptian masses,
noted signs of social unrest and predicted grave disturbances. "A
genuine proletariat," he wrote, "has been created by the multiplication
of industries and the sudden, almost abrupt, progress which has
followed. The cost of living has risen to a scale hitherto unknown in
Egypt, while wages have risen but slightly. Poverty and want abound.
Some day suffering will provoke the people to complaints, perhaps to
angry outbursts, throughout this apparently prosperous Delta. It is true
that the influx of foreigners and of money may put off the hour when the
city or country labourer of Egyptian race comes clearly to perceive the
wrongs that are being done to him. He may miss the educational influence
of Socialism. Yet such an awakening may come sooner than people expect.
It is not only among the successful and prosperous Egyptians that
intelligence is to be found. Those whose wages are growing gradually
smaller and smaller have intelligence of equal keenness, and it has
become a real question as to the hour when for the first time in the
land of Islam the flame of Mohammedan Socialism shall burst forth."[295]
In Algeria, likewise, a Belgian traveller noted the dawning of a
proletarian consciousness among the town working-men just before the
Great War. Speaking of the rapid spread of Western ideas, he wrote:
"Islam tears asunder like rotten cloth on the quays of Algiers: the
dockers, coal-passers, and engine-tenders, to whatever race they belong,
leave their Islam and acquire a genuine proletarian morality, that of
the proletarians of Europe, and they make common cause with their
European colleagues on the basis of a strictly economic struggle. If
there were many big factories in Algeria, orthodox Islam would soon
disappear there, as old-fashioned Catholicism has disappeared with us
under the shock of great industry."[296]

Whatever may be the prospects as to the rapid emergence of organized
labour movements in the Orient, one thing seems certain: the unrest
which afflicted so many parts of the East in the years preceding the
Great War, though mainly political, had also its social side. Toward the
end of 1913, a leading Anglo-Indian journal remarked pessimistically:
"We have already gone so far on the downward path that leads to
destruction that there are distr