1230 president's address. 



On this head one might enlarge for hours. Bat I will not 

 trouble you with more than a humble appeal to help in relieving 

 the voung from their dreadful burden of compound addition, 

 compound subtraction, compound multiplication, and compound 

 division. There are no such monsters in the Decimal System. 

 There the child learns one process, applicable to all arithmetical 

 questions, and has time to think about the reasons of things, if he 

 be of an intellectual nature, and is not. if he be naturally 

 averse from mental labour, frightened also from study by the 

 horrid bugbears which we present to him. Remember, too, that in 

 the highest education, or at least the education which is commonly 

 supposed to be most proper for gentlemens' sons, the whole of this 

 business is quietly ignored — an arrangement which may indeed 

 leave people unprepared for many offices of life, but which at least 

 does not stupefy them with an overpowering fog of idiotic details. 

 Why is the education of working people burdened with a load 

 which those who are, in the vulgar phrase, better off, do not touch 

 with the tip of the finger ^ I do not question that if British 

 legislators here or elsewhere once came to understand how heavily 

 this ancient lumber weights and cripples the classes whose time for 

 schooling is limited, and how, consequently, more enlightened 

 Governments can turn even worse material to better purpose, and 

 so outrun us in the general competition of the world, there would 

 be little time lost in substituting new machinery lor that which is 

 worn out. A single Act of Parliament establishing a Decimal 

 System of Weights and Measures would effect more for the 

 higher education of the masses, than the expenditure of millions 

 upon millions under our present system. 



But these obstacles cannot be removed by a department, much 

 less by individual effort. The third, worse than these, because more 

 aimless and less useful, besides being so tedious and perplexed that 

 the teacher\s themselves are all at sea in its intricacies, is the pride 

 of the Public School, the Glory of the Department, the Analysis 

 of the Sentence ! 



