Present-Day Economic and Social Conditions 247

was averted only by the organizing ability and authority of the
Anglo-American Middle East Supply Centre.1

Attempts are being made to develop the social side of the Arab
League by such projects as the simplifying of passport regulations,
the development of international communications, the co-ordinat-
ing of law, public health, and education; but as long as any part of
the Arab world remains subject to foreign encroachments on its
independence, and as long as the governments of the Arab world
remain dominated by the ageing personalities of the Arab Awaken-
ing and the Revolt, so long will the Arab League continue to be
obsessed with politics, propaganda, and boycotts; and so long will
accusations of widespread nepotism and the inefficiency that goes
with it be levelled with muchjustice at the Arab administrations.

The younger generation of the growing middle-class is the pro-
duct of the school-system modelled on more-or-less European
lines and expanded with perilous rapidity in the period between
the two wars. The very considerable increase in the educational
budgets of Egypt and Iraq since these countries achieved self-
government over twenty years ago has not yet produced a com-
mensurate raising of educational standards, and could not indeed
be expected to do so. It has first been necessary to educate a corps
of teachers along the new lines appropriate to the awakening of the
Middle East. There has been some wastefulness inevitable in the
administrative machinery of these countries at their present stage,
and due in part to inexperience and in part to graft. One is some-
times tempted to suspect that the zeal to expand the school-system
so rapidly derives, not only from a laudable desire to educate the
masses, but also to render them more receptive of nationalist pro-
paganda and to find white-collar employment as teachers for large
numbers of young effendis.2 The younger men have suffered
somewhat from the quality of the education imparted to them, in
1 K. A. H. Murray, in Royal Central Asian Journal, XXXII (1945), 233 ff.
2 A good example of the tendency to spend disproportionately on the middle-
class teacher is provided by a statement of the Egyptian Minister of Education.
After referring to an appropriation for the education of 250,000 children at an
initial cost of £1 2s. 6d. per head, he spoke of the opening of two schools for
training 180 students as 'lady social visitors* at an initial cost of £111 per head,
or just one hundred times the other per capita allocation. (Middle East Opinion
(Cairo), 23 September 1946.)
R