The Sale of Corn by Weight. 
117 
The great question of international weights and measures is 
beyond our present scope ; to undo that occurrence at Babel will 
require theological virtues which international statesmen do 
not at present appear too particularly to exemplify. A step or 
two has been taken. The world has one system of degrees of 
latitude from the equator to the poles. It has adopted the scale 
of 8 for books — a folio, a quarto, an octavo : these are the 
terms on the Continent as well as here, and indicate the same 
sizes. But no recent progress has been made. It is, however, 
in the daily business of life, and especially in its verbal trans- 
actions that uniformity is valuable. Once establish a decimal 
system based on the pound for the British Commonwealth, 
and a penny card of indestructible ivorine the size of a visiting 
card would serve to carry the necessary title for instantly 
indicating the foreign counterpart to our fixed English weight 
of the pound and its tens, hundreds, and thousands. 
The pioneer of effective reform, if ever reform comes, will 
have been the late Mr. Jasper More, M.P. for the Ludlow 
Division of Shropshire. His labours have perhaps their best 
embodiment in the article on “ The Sale of Corn by Weight,” 
which appeared in this Journal in 1891. 1 The gist of the 
whole is in the declaration by a highly placed Government 
servant (the late Mr. H. J. Chaney), whose many years of 
experience in the Standards Department of the Board of Trade 
led him to say : “ I have no doubt that it would be far better 
and that it would avoid a great amount of trickery if corn 
were required to be sold by weight only.” Mr. More’s own 
views were marked by decided moderation and by no common 
foresight. He anticipated the failure of the Government 
quarter of 812 lb. for oats ; he held out the right hand 
of co-operation to France, and through France to the Continent ; 
he appreciated, with Mr. Chamberlain, the cental or true 
hundredweight ; but he was a little too pessimistic as to its 
gaining ground. He agreed with Mr. Chaney that “the tendency 
of the human mind is to halving,” a tendency for which 
the present article has endeavoured to show the underlying 
reason. He made the road easier for all future reformers, who 
would indeed be ungrateful if they forgot to recall and honour 
his services. 
Charles Kains-Jackson. 
18, The Green, 
Richmond, Surrey. 
1 Journal R.A.S.E., Vol. 52, 1891, pp. 717-729. 
