[39] I use the expression "mercantile ethics," which LETOURNEAU used in his book on the Evolution of Ethics (_L'evolution de la morale_), Paris, 1887. In his scientific study of the facts relating to ethics, Letourneau has distinguished four phases: _animal_ ethics--_savage_ ethics--_barbarous_ ethics--_mercantile_ (or bourgeois) ethics; these phases will be followed by a higher phase of ethics which Malon has called _social_ ethics. [40] Some persons, still imbued with political (Jacobin) artificiality, think that in order to solve the social question it will be necessary to generalize the system of _metayage_. They imagine, then--though they do not say so--a royal or presidential decree: "Art. 1. Let all men become metayers!" And it does not occur to them that if metayage, which was the rule, has become a less and less frequent exception, this must be the necessary result of natural causes. The cause of the transformation is to be found in the fact that _metayage_ represents (is a form typical of) petty agricultural industry, and that it is unable to compete with modern agricultural industry organized on a large scale and well equipped with machinery, just as handicrafts have not been able to endure competition with modern manufacturing industry. It is true that there still are to-day some handicraft industries in a few villages, but these are rudimentary organs which merely represent an anterior phase (of production), and which no longer have any important function in the economic world. They are, like the rudimentary organs of the higher species of animals, according to the theory of Darwin, permanent witnesses of past epochs. The same Darwinian and economic law applies to _metayage_, which is also evidently destined to the same fate as handicrafts. _Conf._ the excellent propagandist pamphlet of BIEL, _Ai contadini toscani_, Colle d' Elsa, 1894. [41] HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty, New York, 1898. Doubleday & McClure Co. [42] L. JACOBY, _L'Idea dell' evoluzione_, in _Bibliotheca dell' economista_, serie III, vol. IX, 2d part, p. 69. [43] At the death of Darwin the _Sozialdemokrat_ of the 27th of April, 1882, wrote: "The proletariat who are struggling for their emancipation will ever honor the memory of Charles Darwin." Conf. LAFARGUE, _La theorie darwinienne_. I am well aware that in these last years, perhaps in consequence of the relations between Darwinism and socialism, consideration has again been given to the objections to the theory of Darwin, made by Voegeli, and more recently by Weismann, on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired characters. See SPENCER, _The Inadequacy of Natural Selection_, Paris, 1894.--VIRCHOW, _Transformisme et descendance_, Berlin, 1893. But all this merely concerns such or such a detail of Darwinism, while the fundamental theory of metamorphic organic development remains impregnable. PART SECOND. EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM.