In an evil hour for my party, I had studied (it will be remembered) the Theory of Statistics at Oxford, and had sat at the feet of that erratic genius, Arthur Tonks. It was his favourite thesis that the whole civilized world was groaning under what he called “the decimal illusion.” Through a disastrous legacy of barbarism, he would tell us, we had all agreed to fix our “round number,” after which we started out on “double figures,” at the number of fingers with which Providence had endowed us. “Ladies,” he would tell us, “we are not barbarians, and we do not count on our fingers.” By his way of it, the multiple of three and four, which we have thrust on, as “twelve,” into the teens, ought to have been the round number of our calculations. He had therefore composed a system of counting of his own, which ran “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, tonk, tink, ten,” and was printed for short as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, *, &, 10. By this system, which at Oxford he always hoped to see universally adopted, and later, in his retirement, came to believe had actually been universally adopted, the whole business of calculation was to be infinitely simplified. His was the passion of a fanatic: he would date a letter, not “Sept. 22,” but as “Sept. 1*” (pronounced “tonkteen”), or tell you that the Battle of Waterloo had been fought in A.D. 1513, or announce his nine-thirty lecture as due to begin at “tink twenty-six.”
How saddening a feature it is of that strange process we call “education,” that while we are still in the pupil’s status we laugh at our tutors and make fun of their pet fads, and yet in later life, when those tutors are dead and can no longer accept our tardy homage, come back to the fads we once derided and make them our own! In this matter of coinage reform, I was determined that we would have no half-measures: we would not blunderingly imitate the clumsy practice of Continental nations. If we were to have reform at all, we would have reform on the right lines; “tonk” and “tink” should find their way into every schoolboy’s arithmetic book. If there were to be ten pennies to the shilling, then a penny should be change for tinkpence, and twopence should be change for tonkpence: if we were to have ten inches to the foot, then an inch short should be tink inches and two inches short should be tonk inches. I wrote a letter expounding and defending this principle to all the daily papers, all of which refused to print it, except the _Manchester Guardian_, which had little circulation in the metropolis. However, I was in a position to snap my finger at the dailies: Juliet Savage was now editing the _Spectator_, and she was at one with me in my present determination. Together we organized a violent campaign, reviving as we did so delightful memories of the _Bilston Hall Rocket_ in early days. Poor Miss Montrose, long since gone to her rest, how she must have felt for Mr. Holroyd, attacked by the same two venomous pens that had once marred the peace of her quiet seminary!