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]