CHAPTER VII.
Discouraging Experiences.
One of the many sophistries which seems fated to accompany the advocacy of our perversion from a superior to an inferior system, is that little difficulty has attended the change in foreign countries. It is asserted, unnecessarily, for the truth of it is obvious, that what others have succeeded in doing we can accomplish. Some important considerations are not stated by advocates of the metric system. We stand, and always have stood, in a different position to other countries.
The Anglo-Saxon system, in spite of excrescences which in more primitive times fastened upon it and caused inconvenience, is admittedly a sound one. Other European countries did not have such an advantageous possession. Within their own borders they were at "sixes and sevens." What was right in one province was wrong in another; what was a standard in one city was unrecognised by its neighbour. The large varieties of measures in use—whether in France, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in the German Empire, rendered any new single system, however inferior, a boon, and the confusion of affairs afforded great facilities for the establishment of any system which brought with it the blessing of uniformity.
France first tried the metric system in 1793. Political turmoil, internecine struggles, and foreign warfare,
