The pearl, therefore, being essentially a jewel of the rich, is not affected as others by the whims of fashion. In Oriental countries, where the lives of the masses and what little property they hold are practically at the mercy of their rulers, the centuries make little change in conditions and less in fashions. The nobles have always possessed the jewels of the various eastern countries and the fashion continues through generations and dynasties, to accumulate and hold them until some stronger power takes them away by force. As the people hammered heavy bracelets and anklets out of the precious metals, not alone for display, but also to hoard them, so their princes hoarded jewels. In the old times these hoards of the precious metals were periodically gathered by the requisitions of the princes on the people, and of jewels by the demands of a successful invader upon the princes; but while the possessors changed, the fashion remained always the same, and whether the Shah of Persia, the Ameer of Afghanistan, or the Mogul, there has been no variation in the constant desire to obtain more jewels, pearls among them, and to display them after the same fashion through all the generations. To some extent this is true of pearls in the Occident also. Since Rome set the fashion there has not been a time in the history of any European nation, once it had risen to the pearl-wearing eminence, when the upper classes did not wear pearls. There is this difference between the East and the West however; whereas the men of the East wear them, in the West, pearls are worn almost entirely by women alone. The more rugged life of European men, the coarser fabrics of their garments to suit climatic needs, and their virile distaste for effeminate display, all combine to bar them from a jewel suited only to soft silks and linens or the touch of softer flesh. In ancient times, among Asiatics, fashion probably did not culminate in any direction, as to-day, in a vogue. The inability of the masses to follow a fashion of the upper classes, both for lack of means and permission to do so; the absence of all rapid methods of communication between sections of country within and without national borders, with the consequent limitations of a knowledge of men and things to community affairs, and the paucity of manufacturing possibilities, all combined to make fashions permanent. With the awakening of the vigorous barbarian tribes of Europe to a knowledge of their power, and their rapid civilization, came the frenzied desire of men new to the situation, to crowd as much as possible into the span of life.