However, the long series of European aggressions, culminating in the recent peace settlements which subjected virtually the entire Moslem world to European domination, have been steadily rousing in Moslem hearts a spirit of despairing rage that may have disastrous consequences. Certainly, the materials for a holy war have long been heaping high. More than twenty years ago Arminius Vambery, who knew the Moslem world as few Europeans have ever known it, warned the West of the perils engendered by recklessly imperialistic policies. "As time passes," he wrote in 1898, "the danger of a general war becomes ever greater. We should not forget that time has considerably augmented the adversary's force of resistance. I mean by this the sentiment of solidarity which is becoming livelier of late years among the peoples of Islam, and which in our age of rapid communication is no longer a negligible quantity, as it was even ten or twenty years ago. "It may not be superfluous to draw the attention of our nineteenth-century Crusaders to the importance of the Moslem press, whose ramifications extend all over Asia and Africa, and whose exhortations sink more profoundly than they do with us into the souls of their readers. In Turkey, India, Persia, Central Asia, Java, Egypt, and Algeria, native organs, daily and periodical, begin to exert a profound influence. Everything that Europe thinks, decides, and executes against Islam spreads through those countries with the rapidity of lightning. Caravans carry the news to the heart of China and to the equator, where the tidings are commented upon in very singular fashion. Certain sparks struck at our meetings and banquets kindle, little by little, menacing flames. Hence, it would be an unpardonable legerity to close our eyes to the dangers lurking beneath an apparent passivity. What the _Terdjuman_ of Crimea says between the lines is repeated by the Constantinople _Ikdam_, and is commented on and exaggerated at Calcutta by _The Moslem Chronicle_. "Of course, at present, the bond of Pan-Islamism is composed of tenuous and dispersed strands. But Western aggression might easily unite those strands into a solid whole, bringing about a general war".[60]