These, and other peculiar instances of what may perhaps be called cultural retardation, indicate by way of exception what may have been the ruling causes that have governed in the advance to a higher culture under more ordinary circumstances,--by “ordinary” being intended such circumstances as have apparently led to a different and, it would be held, a more normal result in the old world, and particularly in the region of the Western civilisation. In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an advance in the industrial arts as will result in an accumulation of wealth, a considerable and efficient industrial equipment, or in a systematic and permanent cultivation of the soil or an extensive breeding of herds or flocks, will also bring on ownership and property rights bearing on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the land employed in their production. What has seemed the most natural and obvious beginnings of property rights, in the view of those economists who have taken an interest in the matter, is the storing up of valuables by such of the ancient workmen as were enabled, by efficiency, diligence or fortuitous gains, to produce somewhat more than their current consumption. There are difficulties, though perhaps not insuperable, in the way of such a genesis of property rights and pecuniary differentiation within any given community. The temper of the people bred in the ways of the simpler plan of hand-to-mouth and common interest does not readily bend itself to such an institutional innovation, even though the self-regarding impulses of particular members of the community may set in such a direction as would give the alleged result.[99]