Industry indeed there must have been; it was perhaps the silk industry introduced by Justinian that began the economic salvation of the State; but the law prescribed a system of industrial caste, binding every man, as far as might be, to his father's trade, which must have kept the working populace very much on the level of that of ancient Egypt. Nor can matters have been socially much better in the West, whether in Italy under Byzantine or Lombard rule, or in the new barbarian States, Arian and Catholic. Everywhere the old inequalities of law were rather worsened than cured, and no Christian teacher dreamed of curing them. The ideals of the most earnest among them, as Jerome and Paulinus, began and ended in mere pietism and physical self-mortification. It is not surprising, then, that all over the Christian world the most salient social result of the creed was the institution of monasticism, a Christian adaptation of a usage long common in religious and down-trodden Egypt. Everything conduced to promote it. The spectacle of constant strife and sensuality in the cities moved suffering souls of the unworldly type to withdraw to solitude or the cloister; all the leading teachers applauded the ideal, while denouncing its abuses; and for multitudes of unfortunate or inferior types, avoiding toil or escaping tyranny, then as later, the life of the monk or even of the hermit, though poor, was one of relative ease and idleness, greatly preferable to that of the proletary, since all could count on being at least maintained by popular charity, if not enriched by the believers in their sanctity. To these types were added that of the ignorant fanatic, which seems to have been as numerous as that of the slothful, and which under monastic conditions seems to have become more fanatical than ever. Thus some of the best and much of the worse moral elements, the latter of course immensely predominating, combined to weaken the social fabric, the former by withdrawing their finer personalities from a world that doubly needed them; the latter by withdrawing hands from labour and widening the realm of ignorant faith. Some powerful personalities, as Basil and Chrysostom and Gregory, were bred in the monastic life; but in the main it was a mere impoverishment of civilization. In the critical period of Christian history the monks are often found zealous in works of rabid violence, such as the destruction of pagan temples and Jewish synagogues, and the horrible murder of the pagan girl-philosopher Hypatia in Alexandria; and they too had their furious dogmatic strifes, notably in the fourth and fifth centuries, when those of Egypt constituted themselves the champions of the orthodoxy (then impeached) of Origen, for no clear reason save perhaps the fact of his self-mutilation. But, as Christian historians have remarked, they seem to have done nothing to resist the ruinous onslaught of Islam, which above all things despised monks. For