During this pre-war period the increased difficulty of living conditions, together with the adoption of Western ideas of comfort and kindred higher standards, seem to have been engendering friction between the different strata of the Oriental population. In 1911 a British sanitary expert assigned "wretchedness" as the root-cause of India's political unrest. After describing the deplorable living conditions of the Indian masses, he wrote: "It will of course be said at once that these conditions have existed in India from time immemorial, and are no more likely to cause unrest now than previously; but in my opinion unrest has always existed there in a subterranean form. Moreover, in the old days, the populace could make scarcely any comparison between their own condition and that of more fortunate people; now they can compare their own slums and terrible 'native quarters' with the much better ordered cantonments, stations, and houses of the British officials and even of their own wealthier brethren. So far as I can see, such misery is always the fundamental cause of all popular unrest.... Seditious meetings, political chatter, and 'aspirations' of babus and demagogues are only the superficial manifestations of the deeper disturbance."[288] This growing social friction was indubitably heightened by the lack of interest of Orientals in the sufferings of all persons not bound to them by family, caste, or customary ties. Throughout the East, "social service," in the Western sense, is practically unknown. This fact is noted by a few Orientals themselves. Says an Indian writer, speaking of Indian town life: "There is no common measure of social conduct.... Hitherto, social reform in India has taken account only of individual or family life. As applied to mankind in the mass, and especially to those soulless agglomerations of seething humanity which we call cities, it is a gospel yet to be preached."[289] As an American sociologist remarked of the growing slum evil throughout the industrialized Orient: "The greatest danger is due to the fact that Orientals do not have the high Western sense of the value of the life of the individual, and are, comparatively speaking, without any restraining influence similar to our own enlightened public opinion, which has been roused by the struggles of a century of industrial strife. Unless these elements can be supplied, there is danger of suffering and of abuses worse than any the West has known."[290]