The fact is that the majority of Orientals, despite the considerable penetration of Western ideas and methods that has been going on for the last century, still love their old ruts and hate to be budged out of them. They realize that Western rule furthers more than anything else the Westernization of their social system, their traditional manner of life, and they therefore tend to react fanatically against it. Every innovation imposed by the colonial authorities is apt to rouse the most purblind resistance. For example, compulsory vaccination was bitterly opposed for years by the natives of Algeria. The French officials pointed out that smallpox, hitherto rampant, was being rapidly extirpated. The natives replied that, in their opinion, it was merely a crafty scheme for sterilizing them sexually and thus make room for French colonists. The officials thereupon pointed to the census figures, which showed that the natives were increasing at an unprecedented rate. The natives merely shrugged their shoulders and continued to inveigh against the innovation.
This whole matter has been well summarized by a French writer with a wide knowledge of Mohammedan lands. Says Louis Bertrand:
"In reality, all these peoples, indisposed as they are by their traditions, customs, and climates to live according to our social ideal, hate to endure the constraint of our police, of our administration--in a word, of any sort of _regulated_ government, no matter how just and honest. Delivered from the most anarchic and vexatious of tyrannies, they remain in spirit more or less like our vagabonds, always hoping to escape from the gendarmes. In vain do we point out to the Arabs of North Africa that, thanks to the protection of France, they are no longer pillaged by Turkish despots nor massacred and tortured by rival tribes. They see only one thing: the necessity of paying taxes for matters that they do not understand. We shall never realize the rage, the fury, aroused in our Algerian towns by the simple health department ordinance requiring the emptying of a garbage-can at a fixed hour. At Cairo and elsewhere I have observed the same rebellious feelings among the donkey-boys and cab-drivers subjected to the regulations of the English policeman.