The disadvantages of such a system are, first, that though in practice it is found usually stable, yet in theory it is not necessarily stable, and in practice also there are some communities the social character of which is such that the system cannot be established permanently. It is obvious that, with land and the means of production well distributed among the various families, a few may by luck or special perseverance and cunning, tend to buy up the land and implements of their less fortunate neighbours, and nothing will prevent this but a set of laws backed up by strong public opinion. In other words, people must desire this state of society, and desire it strongly in order to maintain it; and if the desire for ownership and freedom is weak this distributive arrangement will not last. In the absence of special laws, and a public opinion to back them, the idler or the least competent or least lucky of the owners will gradually lose their ownership to the more industrious or the more cunning or more fortunate. Another disadvantage which has often been pointed out is that a state of society of this sort, though usually stable and enduring, falls into a routine (that is, into a traditional way of doing things), which it is very difficult to change. The small owner will not have the same opportunities for travel and for wide experience as the rich man has, and he will tend to go on as his fathers did, and therefore when some new invention arises outside his society he will be slow to adopt it. In this way his society becomes less able to defend itself from predatory neighbours and goes under in war. For a society of this kind is unfitted to the discovery of new things. Contented men feel no special spur to discover or to act on such discovery. That is why we find societies in which land and all the other means of production are well distributed among the greater part of the families of the State becoming too conservative--that is, unwilling to change even for their own advantage. This, of course, is not universally true. For instance: no society in Europe has made more progress in agriculture than the Danish society of small owners. But, take the world all over, this kind of state is usually backward, that is, slow to take up improvements in production and to avail itself of new discoveries in physical science.