The Great War of course immensely aggravated an already critical situation. The Orient suddenly saw the European peoples, who, in racial matters, had hitherto maintained something like solidarity, locked in an internecine death-grapple of unparalleled ferocity; it saw those same peoples put one another furiously to the ban as irreconcilable foes; it saw white race-unity cleft by moral and political gulfs which white men themselves continuously iterated would never be filled. The one redeeming feature of the struggle, in Oriental eyes, was the liberal programme which the Allied statesmen inscribed upon their banners. But when the war was over and the Allies had won, it promptly leaked out that at the very time when the Allied leaders were making their liberal speeches they had been negotiating a series of secret treaties partitioning the Near East between them in a spirit of the most cynical imperialism; and in the peace conferences that closed the war it was these secret treaties, not the liberal speeches, which determined the Oriental settlement, resulting (on paper at least) in the total subjugation of the Near and Middle East to European political control.
The wave of wrath which thereupon rolled over the East was not confined to furious remonstrance like the protests of pre-war days. There was a note of immediate resistance and rebellion not audible before. This rebellious temper has translated itself into warlike action which has already forced the European Powers to abate some of their extreme pretensions and which will undoubtedly make them abate others in the near future. The details of this post-war unrest will be discussed in later chapters. Suffice it to say here that the Great War has shattered European prestige in the East and has opened the eyes of Orientals to the weaknesses of the West. To the Orient the war was a gigantic course of education. For one thing, millions of Orientals and negroes were taken from the remotest jungles of Asia and Africa to serve as soldiers and labourers in the White Man's War. Though the bulk of these auxiliaries were used in colonial operations, more than a million of them were brought to Europe itself. Here they killed white men, raped white women, tasted white luxuries, learned white weaknesses—and went home to tell their people the whole story.[110] Asia and Africa to-day know Europe as they never knew it before, and we may be sure that they will make use of their knowledge. The most serious factor in the situation is that the Orient realizes that the famous Versailles "Peace" which purports to have pacified Europe is no peace, but rather an unconstructive, unstatesmanlike futility that left old sores unhealed and even dealt fresh wounds. Europe to-day lies debilitated and uncured, while Asia and Africa see in this a standing incitement to rash dreams and violent action.
Such is the situation to-day: an East, torn by the conflict between new and old, facing a West riven with dissension and sick from its mad follies. Probably never before have the relations between the two worlds contained so many incalculable, even cataclysmic, possibilities. The point to be here noted is that this strange new East which now faces us is mainly the result of Western influences permeating it in unprecedented fashion for the past hundred years. To the chief elements in that permeation let us now turn.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] For the larger aspects, see my book The Rising Tide of Colour against White World-Supremacy (New York and London, 1920).
[73] On these points, see Arminius Vambéry, Western Culture in Eastern Lands (London, 1906); also his La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans (Paris, 1898); C. S. Cooper, The Modernizing of the Orient (New York, 1914); S. Khuda Bukhsh, Essays: Indian and Islamic (London, 1912); A. J. Brown, "Economic Changes in Asia," The Century, March, 1904.
[74] For the effect of the West intellectually and spiritually, see Vambéry, op. cit.; Sir Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London, 1910); J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (New York, 1915); Rev. J. Morrison, New Ideas in India: A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments (Edinburgh, 1906); the Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, especially Vol. II., pp. 228-243 (London, 1908).
[75] For the Westernised élites, see L. Bertrand, Le Mirage Orientale (Paris, 1910); Cromer, op. cit.; A. Métin, L'Inde d'aujourd'hui: Étude Sociale (Paris, 1918); A. Le Chatelier, "Politique musulmane," Revue du Monde musulman, September, 1910.
[76] Chirol, op. cit., pp 321-322.
[77] Bertrand, op. cit., p 39. See also Bukhsh, op. cit.; Farquhar, op. cit.; Morrison, op. cit.; R. Mukerjee, The Foundations of Indian Economics (London, 1916); D. H. Dodwell, "Economic Transition in India," Economic Journal, December, 1910.