The facility in calculations afforded by the metric scheme is common to all decimal systems, which after all are very ancient, but clerical convenience is not everything—in thought and practice we will always adhere to binary sub-divisions in our commercial measures, halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and so on. Those who are in touch with trade in the metric countries would derive benefit from a change, by doing away with the necessity of transposing the weights and measures of one system into another. It is at best a question of the cost of securing trade, and to enable a small minority to reap an advantage at the enormous expense of the great majority.
Merchants who trade abroad must be prepared to face exactly the same difficulties which meet the foreign manufacturers who wish to exploit the markets in English-speaking communities, which have uniformity in all essentials.
The argument that we should adopt metricalisation because so many other countries have done so, is unsound. In acting as they did they made an advance. We, in the British Empire, have, fortunately, no such multiplicity of measures as they had, and which made uniformity cheap at any price. Still, favourable as were the conditions for the introduction of something very much better than they possessed, the difficulties met during the transition periods—in many cases not yet ended—were very great.
So far as scientists are concerned, generally they use the metric system, and are in no way hindered in calculating by any method they select. They are indifferent to the units of retail trade, the pecks, pots, and pounds, or the quarters, eighths, and sixteenths of daily weighing and measuring. Professional men must, however, use a system having
