Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/211

of knowledge from uncivilized times to our own and the breaking down of habits, now going on with accelerated rapidity, he does not share the expectation that the 12-notation "will ever be adopted in practice," the obstacles to the change being too great. But without opposing the metric system as threatening to stand in the way of a more perfect system, he opposes it as intrinsically undesirable, saying:—"I think that all that can be done is to make our coinage and measures as little decimal as possible, and our computation as decimal as may be."

 

IV.

From one who every month has to act as auditor, I have received a letter in which he says: "I had to go over more than £20,000 of accounts yesterday, and was very thankful that it was not in francs."

This statement, coming from a man of business, has suggested to me the question. By whose advice is it that the metric system of weights, measures, and values is to be adopted? Is it by the advice of those who spend their lives in weighing and measuring and receiving payments for goods? Is it that the men who alone are concerned in portioning out commodities of one or other kind to customers, and who have every minute need for using this or that division or subdivision of weights or measures, have demanded to use the decimal system? Far from it. I venture to say that in no case has the retail trader been consulted. There lies before me an imposing list of the countries that have followed the lead of France. It is headed Progress of the Metric System. It might fitly have been headed Progress of Bureaucratic Coercion. When, fifty years after its nominal establishment in France, the metric system was made compulsory, it was not because those who had to measure out commodities to customers wished to use it, but because the Government commanded them to do so; and when it was adopted in Germany under the Bismarckian régime, we may be sure that the opinions of shopkeepers were not asked. Similarly elsewhere, its adoption has resulted from the official will and not from the popular will.

"Why has this happened? For an answer we must go back to the time of the French Revolution, when scientific men were intrusted with the task of forming a rational system of weights, measures, and values for universal use. The idea was a great one, and, allowing for the fundamental defect on which I have been insisting, it was admirably carried out. As this defect does not diminish its great convenience for scientific purposes, the system has been gradually adopted by scientific men all over the world; the great advantage being that measurements registered by a scientific man of one nation are without any trouble made intelli-