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a powerful influence for peace and amity among the tribes, but a strong mercantile organization under whose stimulus trade developed and flourished. In the last years of his life he undertook in person to extend the influence of the brotherhood to the southward. He had gone to Geru, south of Kufra, when his death came suddenly in the year 1900.

The sons of el Mahdi were then minors, and his nephew Sayed Ahmed was made the head of the brotherhood. He was the guardian of Sayed Idris, who, as the eldest son of el Mahdi, was his legitimate successor.

§ 3

The new head of the Senussis made an abrupt departure from the policies of his predecessors. He sought to combine temporal and spiritual power. When the Italians took over Cyrenaica and Tripoli from the Turks, Sayed Ahmed attempted to unite his spiritual power as head of the brotherhood with the remnants of temporal and military power left by the Turks. Then the Great War broke out, and he allowed himself to be persuaded by Turkish and German emissaries to attack the western frontier of Egypt. The effort was a complete failure, and Sayed Ahmed was compelled to go to Constantinople in a German submarine.

The third of the Senussi leaders saw things differently from the Grand Senussi and his great son. They realized that a spiritual leader cannot be beaten on his own ground, whereas if he takes the field in quest of temporal supremacy, it requires only a few military reverses to destroy his prestige. The power of Sayed Ibn

Ali el Senussi and Sayed el Mahdi lay in themselves and in the spiritual influence that radiated from them. Sayed Ahmed surrendered this influence to rely upon arms, ammunition, and circumstances. When these failed, there was nothing left.

From the hands of Sayed Ahmed the Senussi leadership fell to the lineal successor, Sayed Idris. He derives a considerable part of the prestige which he undoubtedly possesses from the fact that he is the son of el Mahdi. But even without that advantage his own personal qualities would be an adequate foundation for success in the important position to which he has been called. He combines gentleness of disposition with firmness of character to a high degree. He has the loyal allegiance and support not only of the Senussi ikhwan, but of the people of the Libyan Desert.

In 1917 an agreement was entered into by the Italian Government with Sayed Idris, as head of the Senussi brotherhood, by which his right to administer the affairs of the oases of Jalo, Aujila, Jedabia, and Kufra was expressly recognized. This agreement was again ratified two years later. Unfortunately, in 1923 a misunderstanding between the parties to this agreement caused it to lapse. It is to be hoped, however, that a new arrangement will be entered into between Sayed Idris and the Italian authorities which will restore to these oases of the Libyan Desert their peace and prosperity.

The importance of these aspects of the Senussi rule in maintaining the tranquillity and well-being of the people of the Libyan Desert can scarcely be overestimated.

Social Classes in Post-War Europe

T

I-The Peasants

BY LOTHROP STODDARD

He observant traveler who tours Europe must be constantly impressed by one curious factthe profound contrast between city and country. This contrast is not merely one of physical surroundings; it is even more a difference in spirit and in time. Europe's cities and industrial districts are distinctly modern in tone, differing relatively little from similar centers in America. One observes many ancient buildings and peculiar customs; yet these appear more or less archaic survivals amid the general modern trend.

But when you leave the city or industrial district and enter the country-side, you get the impression of having dropped back into an earlier age. Gone are the crowded streets and smoking factories, rumbling with multitudinous machines and vibrant with mechanical power. Instead, you find yourself passing through quiet villages of old, old houses, or amid carefully tilled fields patiently cultivated for centuries, studded by farmsteads hoary with age. Here modernity and mechanism play minor parts. The typical European countryman is the "peasant," a type virtually unknown in America. The European peasant is a being rooted in the ancestral soil, steeped in tradition, and

fundamentally alien in spirit to industrial city life. He represents the older, greener Europe of a century ago, before modern industry had wrought its transformation.

The truth is that there are two Europes, an urban, industrial Europe; and a rural, non-industrial (almost anti-industrial) Europe, the former superimposed upon the latter. That is a fact which, though often overlooked, is of vital importance. It was important even before the war; it is doubly important to-day, because the war has so altered the relative importance of these two Europes that it may change the whole trend of European life. The trend of events in Europe seems to portend a shifting of the balance of power in most European nations from town to country, something from which the peasant would be the principal gainer.

How rapidly urbanization proceeded in the nineteenth century can be realized by comparing the Europe of 1800 with the Europe of 1914. In the year 1800 Europe was still overwhelmingly rural, the vast majority of its inhabitants (then numbering only 150,000,000) living in the country. This was true even of those nations to-day most thoroughly urbanized. In England and Wales, for

example, where four fifths of the population are now townsfolk, five sixths of the population then lived in the country. In the year 1800 only two cities, London and Paris, contained more than 500,000 inhabitants, while Berlin had fewer than 200,000. London was the only city that boasted the luxury of lamp-posts.

Furthermore, the towns and cities of those days exerted relatively little influence upon the country-side. Town and country were, in fact, sharply sundered from each other by lack of good transportation. A century ago only a few decent highways existed, while such things as railroads and motor-trucks were of course undreamed-of. In fact, the towns were much more dependent upon the country than the country was upon the towns. The country-side not only grew its own food, but made its own clothes and fashioned such simple implements as it then required. No vast industrial centers flooded the land with their manufactured products. Most staple articles were made piecemeal in peasant cottages or by itinerant journeymen. The towns supplied the country with certain comforts and luxuries, but were not really vital to its existence.

Of course the country-side of a century ago differed greatly from the country-side of to-day. The mass of the rural population were tenants or even serfs upon the estates of the nobility and gentry or upon crown or church domains.

Such was the Europe of 1800. A century later things were utterly changed. A new Europe had arisen, vastly richer, and with a population expanded more than threefold, to 460,000,000, in the year 1914. But

this prodigious increase in wealth and population was in the main due not to agriculture, but to modern industry, with its accompanying development of urban life. Had Europe remained the rural continent of 1800, no such increase of population could possibly have taken place. The Europe of 1800 was not virgin soil; it was the most stable and civilized portion of the globe. It is therefore safe to say that it was about full of people; in other words, it had about as many inhabitants as could be provided for by the agriculture and commerce of that day. What, then, accounts for the prodigious growth of population in this essentially old continent during the last century?

The main reason for Europe's prodigious increase in population is what is known as the "Industrial Revolution," the rise of modern machine industry, with its incalculable acceleration of mass production, together with the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. That it was which made possible the existence of fresh millions of population. But these new millions of workers were dwellers in cities. In other words, one of the outstanding features of the nineteenth century was a sudden shifting of the balance of power between town and country and the increasing subordination of the country to the town.

This urbanizing process took place in greater or less degree all over Europe. Great Britain is the classic example. It was here that the Industrial Revolution began, and was carried to its logical conclusion. We have already seen that at the beginning of the nineteenth century only one sixth of the population of England

and Wales lived in towns or cities. Needless to add, Great Britain was at that time a self-feeding nation. By 1914 conditions were absolutely reversed. In England and Wales nearly four fifths, and in Scotland three fourths, of the total population lived under urban conditions; and Great Britain, become a vast industrial workshop and trading mart, was absolutely dependent upon imported food-stuffs, her home-grown produce being unable to nourish the population more than ninety days in the year.

This same urbanizing process was going on somewhat less rapidly in the other European nations, even backward agricultural Russia developing a considerable industrial urban population. The only important European state which succeeded in maintaining a balance between town and country was France, where in 1914 slightly more than half the population still lived in the country and kept her virtually a self-feeding nation.

Now, Europe's urbanization tended to react unfavorably upon European agriculture in general and upon the peasantry in particular. Here was what happened. The growing demand for agricultural produce raised the price of land and made necessary improved and more expensive methods of cultivation. The peasants, especially where they were not owners, but tenants, could not compete with the large landowners, and were consequently either depressed to the condition of agricultural laborers or, abandoning the land altogether, went to swell the growing proletariat of the factory towns. Of course there were exceptions, notably in France, where an unusually thrifty and intelligent peasantry held on to the

land and kept small holdings the rule.

As for the large landowners, their prosperity, too, was gradually undermined. The chief reason for this was the increasing competition of imported food-stuffs. At the beginning of the nineteenth century methods of communication were so slow and costly that bulky food staples could not be transported far at a profit, and each region was thus obliged to grow its own produce or, in times of stress, to rely upon the surplus of near neighbors. By the middle of the century, however, the development of railways and steamships began to make it possible to move masses of goods great distances with cheapness and speed. A little later the simultaneous opening up of vast areas of virgin soil, like the American West, Canada, Argentina, and even Australia, disclosed potential rivals against whom European agriculture could hardly compete.

What was likely to happen to European agriculture generally was already made plain by what had actually happened in Great Britain. In this most industrialized and urbanized part of Europe agriculture's battle had been fought and lost. Feeling first the competition of foreign food-stuffs, the English landowners had for a time succeeded in protecting themselves behind tariff barriers, the so-called "Corn Laws." But this had aroused all classes of town-dwellers, eager for cheap food, and when political power presently passed with wealth and numbers into urban hands, the Corn Laws were repealed, and British agriculture was sacrificed. Free-trade England became the industrial center of the world, but at the cost of its country-side.

Warned by England's example, the

rural elements on the continent of Europe put up a stiffer and more successful fight. Landed gentry, peasants, and agricultural laborers alike banded together in agrarian parties, and throughout the nineteenth century obtained enough tariff protection against foreign food-stuffs to avert economic ruin. Nevertheless, as urbanization proceeded, the struggle became harder and harder. As in England, the political balance of power was passing into urban hands, the cry of the cities for cheap food became ever more insistent, and the rural population found itself fighting with its back to the wall for the maintenance of those tariff schedules which alone safeguarded its existence.

Even as things were, the supremacy of the town over the country was enforced in countless subtle, but important, ways, so that the discerning eye of the economist could accurately gage the country-side's tributary relation to the town. Not only were the cities the centers of wealth, culture, and government; they were also reducing the country-side to a close economic dependence through the supplanting of rural handicrafts by urban mass-produced manufactures.

§ 2

Then came the Great War, and with it a momentous change. The complex, highly organized industrial system of urban Europe was smashed as by a trip-hammer. Even in western Europe overseas communications were disrupted, while central Europe was hermetically sealed by the Allied blockade. This meant that, foreign food having become costly or unprocurable, home-grown food had once more become a necessity. In other

words, the balance of power had shifted overnight, and the countryside again held the whip-hand. The townsman went hungry; the peasant kept hale and hearty from the produce of his acres, and sold his surplus at unheard-of prices that brought him record prosperity.

And this dependence was far greater than that of a century before. We have already seen that the prodigious increase in Europe's population during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been mainly an increase in urban elements largely dependent upon imported food. upon imported food. Economists estimate that Europe's population is today something like 100,000,000 greater than it can adequately support without an industrial life functioning on approximately the pre-war scale. In other words, unless Europe can restore her shattered industrial fabric and regain her old share of the world's markets, nearly one fourth of her aggregate population is threatened with economic ills ranging from discomfort to downright starvation. this threatened one fourth is of course almost entirely urban. The rural population can live and thrive.

But

During the war years, to be sure, this antithesis between town and country was obscured by patriotism. The governments protected the townsmen by food-rationing, compelling the peasants to deliver their produce at fixed prices, and the peasants obeyed without too much grumbling, owing to the desire for victory over the common enemy. The wave of revolutionary unrest which marked the close of the war likewise tended to mitigate the rising antagonism between town and country by temporarily drawing the urban and rural

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