6. Putting forward, as necessary, sums and calculations which a decently taught schoolboy would laugh at.
7. Ignoring all that is convenient in our system and all that is inconvenient in the metric system.
8. Ignoring the satisfaction of the people of the United States with our system, even when retaining the old wine-gallon and corn-gallon.
9. Ignoring the resistance of the French people to the metric system after a century of education in it and of police-constraint.
10. Urging us to follow the example of other countries that have adopted it, but omitting to find out whether the peoples of these countries, from civilised Germany to barbarous Haïti, use it—so far as they do use it—otherwise than under compulsion. It is the governments of these countries, not the people, that have adopted it, always in the name of Science; and the day police-pressure were taken off, the old system would return, or, at the least, the decimal series would disappear.
11. Threatening loss of foreign trade, when our trade weights and measures are so well understood by foreign manufacturers and merchants that they find no difficulty in placing their goods on our market, and are so well known that many foreign manufacturers find it impossible to use metric standards, those of England being alone accepted in most of the markets to which British manufactures are exported.
12. Calling opponents prejudiced, unprogressive, unscientific, wanting in business experience and common sense.
I have even seen it put forward (in a book now before me) that our system has several bushels, indeed thirty is the number given; the ground for this assertion being that bushels of wheat, of oats, or peas, &c., are of different weights. The propagandist supposed no one would think of answering that it is the same with the Hectolitre, which contains different weights of different grains.
Such are the arguments used in the propaganda of a system which would make much of the past life of our country unintelligible, send most of its manufacturing machinery to the scrap-heap, dislocate trade for years and bring about in our country the same struggle that is still to be seen in France between the law and the people.
The claims of the metric system are exactly on the same basis as those of the Esperanto language. If the metric system were made compulsory, an energetic body of Esperantists might only have to adopt the metric plan of campaign to get their ‘simple, rational, scientific and international’ language made first optional, and then, when it was found that no one would use it, compulsory, while the use of the antiquated and unscientific English language would be forbidden.