Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/206

 possessed considerable funds, which were, in most cases, wisely used.

One of our earliest and hardest battles was to secure to the whole people the facilities and benefits of the decimal and metric system. The strain in the first step was ever the block in the way here; and but for our imperative intervention, the hesitation of the country might have indefinitely postponed that preliminary crisis, which each year's delay in the advancing society was only to render of the greater dimensions. With our unsystematic and confused moneys and weights and measures, we resembled a man with all his limbs out of joint, but who stood shivering and hesitating over the indispensable preliminary wrench, which was to set him to rights. The "permissive" system having failed, the compulsory must be resorted to. The general diffusion of education, by the time our successful action opened in this case, had a decided effect, alike in mitigating first difficulties, and abbreviating the trying interval of transition from the old to the new system. In thus practically superseding multiplication and division in the daily arithmetic of the people's life and business, we appreciably unhandicapped the entire industrial front, and thenceforth sent the country onwards at a goodly increase of pace.

In fiscal policy, again, we held successfully for two leading principles. Public revenue, in countries so settled, populous, and wealthy as ours, should by this time be levied, mainly if not indeed wholly, from only two sources, which ought to prove always sufficient. First, from realized property, seeing that the costly fabric of government was substantially for