rate, is the way multitudes of Orientals read the
situation, and their rebellious feelings were stimulated not merely by
consciousness of their own strength and Western disunion, but also by
the active encouragement of a new ally--Bolshevik Russia. Russian
Bolshevism had thrown down the gauntlet to Western civilization, and in
the desperate struggle which was now on, the Bolshevik leaders saw with
terrible glee the golden opportunities vouchsafed them in the East. The
details of Bolshevik activity in the Orient will be considered in the
chapter on Social Unrest. Suffice it to remember here that Bolshevik
propaganda is an important element in that profound ferment which
extends over the whole Near and Middle East; a ferment which has reduced
some regions to the verge of chaos and which threatens to increase
rather than diminish in the immediate future.

To relate all the details of contemporary Eastern unrest would fill a
book in itself. Let us here content ourselves with considering the chief
centres of this unrest, remembering always that it exists throughout the
Moslem world from French North Africa to Central Asia and the Dutch
Indies. The centres to be here surveyed will be Egypt, Persia, and the
Turkish and Arab regions of the former Ottoman Empire. A fifth main
centre of unrest--India--will be discussed in the next chapter.

The gathering storm first broke in Egypt. During the war Egypt, flooded
with British troops and subjected to the most stringent martial law, had
remained quiet, but it was the quiet of repression, not of passivity.
We have seen how, with the opening years of the twentieth century,
virtually all educated Egyptians had become more or less impregnated
with nationalist ideas, albeit a large proportion of them believed in
evolutionary rather than revolutionary methods. The chief hope of the
moderates had been the provisional character of English rule. So long as
England declared herself merely in "temporary occupation" of Egypt,
anything was possible. But the proclamation of the protectorate in 1914,
which declared Egypt part of the British Empire, entirely changed the
situation. Even the most moderate nationalists felt that the future was
definitely prejudged against them and that the door had been irrevocably
closed upon their ultimate aspirations. The result was that the
moderates were driven over to the extremists and were ready to join the
latter in violent action as soon as opportunity might