s in criminality--that it
is the resultant of the combined action of the race and the environment.

Among the recent works which support the thesis of the exclusive or
predominant influence of race, I must mention LE BON, _Les lois
psychologiques de l'evolution des peuples_, Paris, 1894. This work is,
however, very superficial. I refer the reader for a more thorough
examination of these two theses to Chap. IV of my book _Omicidio nell'
anthropologia criminale_, Turin, 1894.

[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.

[