Mahometan Persia, operated upon Greece and Rome. The whole Pagan world escaped the evils of redundant population by vicious repressions of it beforehand. But under Christianity a new state of things was destined to take effect. Many protections and excitements to population were laid in the framework of this new religion, which, by its new code of rules and impulses, in so many ways extended the free-agency of human beings. Manufacturing industry was destined first to arise on any great scale under Christianity. Except in Tyre and Alexandria (see the Emperor Hadrian's account of this last), there was no town or district in the ancient world where the populace could be said properly to work. The rural laborers worked a little--not much;--and sailors worked a little;--nobody else worked at all. Even slaves had little more work distributed amongst each ten than now settles upon one. And in many other ways, by protecting the principle of life, as a mysterious sanctity, Christianity has favored the development of an excessive population. There it is that Christianity, being answerable for the mischief, is answerable for its redress. Therefore it is that, breeding the disease, Christianity breeds the cure. Extending the vast lines of poverty, Christianity it was that first laid down the principle of a relief for poverty. Constantine, the first Christian potentate, laid the first stone of the mighty overshadowing institution since reared in Christian lands to poverty, disease, orphanage, and mutilation. Christian instincts, moving and speaking through that Caesar, first carried out that great idea of Christianity. Six years was Christianity in building Constantinople, and in the seventh she rested from her labors, saying, 'Henceforward let the poor man have a haven of rest for ever; a rest from his work for one day in seven; a rest from his anxieties by a legal and fixed relief.' Being legal, it could not be open to disturbances of caprice in the giver; being fixed, it was not open to disturbances of miscalculation in the receiver. Now, first, when first Christianity was installed as a public organ of government (and first owned a distinct political responsibility), did it become the duty of a religion which assumed, as it were, the _official_ tutelage of poverty, to proclaim and consecrate that function by some great memorial precedent. And, accordingly, in testimony of that obligation, the first Christian Caesar, on behalf of Christianity, founded the first system of relief for pauperism. It is true, that largesses from the public treasury, gratuitous coin, or corn sold at diminished rates, not to mention the _sportulae_ or stated doles of private Roman nobles, had been distributed amongst the indigent citizens of Western Rome for centuries before Constantine; but all these had been the selfish bounties of factious ambition or intrigue.