practical importance to any man alive. . . . The metre is, of course, too long to be the common measure. . . . In decimal division the next thing would be the decimetre, which would be too short to take the place of the foot. The same thing applies very much to the other measures, nor can I conceive the reason for urging the subdivision of the centimetre as opposed to the subdivision of one inch."
Seiss declared the metric system to be utterly meaningless, and inharmonious with nature, as well in its unit as in its fractions and multiplications; that it was inherently inconvenient. He says the unit of length is unstridable and incapable of any natural measurement. Sir John Herschell stigmatised it as "the worst measure in the world," and Becket Denison said "it was an inconvenient, inaccurate, and unstridable measure."
Herbert Spencer, in a series of articles published in the London Times in 1896, claimed that the fundamental principle of the metric system is essentially imperfect, and its faults great and incurable. He also added: "Professedly aiming to introduce uniformity of method, the metric system cannot be brought into harmony with certain unalterable divisions of space, nor with certain natural divisions of time; nor with the artificial divisions of time which all civilised men have adopted. As 10 is divisible only by 5 and 2 (of which the resulting fifth is useless), its divisibility is of the smallest, and having only a makeshift fourth and no exact third, it will not lend itself to that division into aliquot parts so needful for the purposes of daily life."
