THE METRIC SYSTEM. 733 



commercial arithmetic none is comparable to that of expressing 

 shillings, pence, and farthings as decimals of a pound. The rules 

 are thereby put almost upon as good a footing as if the country 

 possessed the advantage of a real decimal coinage," He then 

 proceeds to develop rules by means of which any sum of English 

 money may be expressed in pounds and decimals exactly as our 

 money is always expressed in dollars and decimals, so that any re- 

 quired operation may be easily performed by the common rules of 

 arithmetic. After this the decimals of a pound must be reduced 

 back again to shillings, pence, and farthings. To show how the Eng- 

 lish system lends itself to easy calculation, I quote his rule, which 

 is only approximately correct, for making the latter reduction : 

 "A pair of shillings for every unit, in the first place; an odd 

 shilling for fifty {if there be fifty), in the second and third places ; 

 and a farthing for every thousandth left, after abating one if 

 the number of thousandths left exceed twenty -four." Can any- 

 thing be more charmingly simple and easily carried in one's 

 head than this ? 



I must be content to stop without reference to a few other 

 points raised by Mr. Spencer, for they are essentially all of a 

 kind. There is a sentiment underlying much of his argument, to 

 which I must briefly refer, however, because it has shown itself 

 in other recent discussions of this subject. I refer to an anxiety 

 lest the "poor man*' be in some way injured by the proposed 

 reform. It has come to be the fashion in all political or eco- 

 nomical controversies to exhibit a consuming interest in the 

 poor man's welfare ; indeed, one marvels that there should con- 

 tinue to be any poor, so universal and so intense appears to be 

 this anxiety to shield them from all harm. Fortunately, the 

 so-called "poor man" is not so blind to his own interests as some 

 would have it appear, and he is quite alive to the fact that the 

 proposed metrological reform is fully as important to him as to 

 anybody. 



Finally, it ought to be understood that the advocates of the 

 metric system do not assume that it can come into use immedi- 

 ately or without considerable hardship. It took nearly a century 

 to fairly establish our decimal money system, which no one would 

 now think of giving up. During all this time old units and 

 denominations continued to be used in a lessening degree, al- 

 though not authorized by law. Something of the kind must 

 occur in the transfer from our illogical, brain-destroying, time- 

 consuming system of weights and measures for the more perfect 

 system for which it is sure to make way. Furthermore, they 

 heartily welcome and desire the presentation of all arguments 

 against or objections to the metric system, believing that the 

 more widely it is known and discussed the more supporters it 



