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.

The theory of universal evolution which—­apart from such or such a more or less disputable detail—­is truly characteristic of the vital tendency of modern scientific thought, has also been made to appear in absolute contradiction with the theories and the practical ideals of socialism.

In this case the fallacy is obvious.

If socialism is understood as that vague complex of sentimental aspirations so often crystallized into the artificial utopian creations of a new human world to be substituted by some sort of magic in a single day for the old world in which we live; then it is quite true that the scientific theory of evolution condemns the presumptions and the illusions of artificial or utopian political theories, which, whether they are reactionary or revolutionary, are always romantic, or in the words of the American Senator Ingalls, are “iridescent dreams.”

But, unfortunately for our adversaries, contemporary socialism is an entirely different thing from the socialism which preceded the work of Marx.  Apart from the same sentiment of protest against present injustices and the same aspirations toward a better future, there is nothing in common between these two socialisms, neither in their logical structure nor in their deductions, unless it be the clear vision, which in modern socialism becomes a mathematically exact prediction (thanks to the theories of evolution) of the final social organization—­based on the collective ownership of the land and the means of production.