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. [240] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p. 13. [241] _I. e._ the priestly class. [242] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p. 15. [243] Vambery, _La Turquie d'aujourd'hui et d'avant Quarante Ans_, p. 51. [244] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, pp. 221-226. [245] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, p. 240. [246] The purdah is the curtain separating the women's apartments from the rest of the house. [247] Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_, pp. 254-255.