Turning to the Near East--more than a decade ago a French Socialist writer, observing the hard living conditions of the Egyptian masses, noted signs of social unrest and predicted grave disturbances. "A genuine proletariat," he wrote, "has been created by the multiplication of industries and the sudden, almost abrupt, progress which has followed. The cost of living has risen to a scale hitherto unknown in Egypt, while wages have risen but slightly. Poverty and want abound. Some day suffering will provoke the people to complaints, perhaps to angry outbursts, throughout this apparently prosperous Delta. It is true that the influx of foreigners and of money may put off the hour when the city or country labourer of Egyptian race comes clearly to perceive the wrongs that are being done to him. He may miss the educational influence of Socialism. Yet such an awakening may come sooner than people expect. It is not only among the successful and prosperous Egyptians that intelligence is to be found. Those whose wages are growing gradually smaller and smaller have intelligence of equal keenness, and it has become a real question as to the hour when for the first time in the land of Islam the flame of Mohammedan Socialism shall burst forth."[295] In Algeria, likewise, a Belgian traveller noted the dawning of a proletarian consciousness among the town working-men just before the Great War. Speaking of the rapid spread of Western ideas, he wrote: "Islam tears asunder like rotten cloth on the quays of Algiers: the dockers, coal-passers, and engine-tenders, to whatever race they belong, leave their Islam and acquire a genuine proletarian morality, that of the proletarians of Europe, and they make common cause with their European colleagues on the basis of a strictly economic struggle. If there were many big factories in Algeria, orthodox Islam would soon disappear there, as old-fashioned Catholicism has disappeared with us under the shock of great industry."[296]