After warning his fellow-countrymen that neither improved methods of agriculture, the growth of industry, nor emigration can afford any real relief to the growing pressure of population on means of subsistence, he notes a few hopeful signs that, despite the hold of religion and custom, the people are beginning to realize the situation and that in certain parts of India there are foreshadowings of birth-control. For example, he quotes from the census report for 1901 this official explanation of a slight drop in the birth-rate of Bengal: "The postponement of the age of marriage cannot wholly account for the diminished rate of reproduction. The deliberate avoidance of child-bearing must also be partly responsible.... It is a matter of common belief that among the tea-garden coolies of Assam means are frequently taken to prevent conception, or to procure abortion." And the report of the Sanitary Commissioner of Assam for 1913 states: "An important factor in producing the defective birth-rate appears to be due to voluntary limitation of birth."[270]
However, these beginnings of birth-control are too local and partial to afford any immediate relief to India's growing over-population. Wider appreciation of the situation and prompt action are needed. "The conclusion is irresistible. We can no longer afford to shut our eyes to the social canker in our midst. In the land of the bullock-cart, the motor has come to stay. The competition is now with the more advanced races of the West, and we cannot tell them what Diogenes said to Alexander: 'Stand out of my sunshine.' After the close of this gigantic World War theories of population will perhaps be revised and a reversion in favour of early marriage and larger families may be counted upon. But, (1) that will be no solution to our own population problem, and (2) this reaction will be only for a time.... The law of population may be arrested in its operation, but there is no way of escaping it."[271]
So concludes this striking little book. Furthermore, we must remember that, although India may be the acutest sufferer from over-population, conditions in the entire Orient are basically the same, prudential checks and rational birth-control being everywhere virtually absent.[272] Remembering also that, besides over-population, there are other economic and social evils previously discussed, we cannot be surprised to find in all Eastern lands much acute poverty and social degradation.
Both the rural and urban masses usually live on the bare margin of subsistence. The English economist Brailsford thus describes the condition of the Egyptian peasantry: "The villages exhibited a poverty such as I have never seen even in the mountains of anarchical Macedonia or among the bogs of Donegal.... The villages 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. Houses 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. This is particularly the case in the urban centres, where the lower classes—workmen, carters, cab-drivers, shopkeepers, and a host off minor employees—are hard put to it nowadays to make both ends meet."[282] As a result of all these hard conditions various phenomena of social degradation such as alcoholism, vice, and crime, are becoming increasingly common.[283] Last—but not least—there are growing symptoms of social unrest and revolutionary agitation, which we will examine in the next chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[239] I. e. the educated upper class.