Page:British Weights and Measures - Superior to the Metric, by James W. Evans.djvu/47

Rh the community, wholesale and retail traders and their customers, whose transactions in daily life would be disturbed by the abolition of the long-familiar standards, and those who had expressed no desire for a change.” This was negatived; none the less, it expresses a concrete truth.

It has been well said that “a commercial system of measures requires time for perfect development; it must be suited to the race, and their forms of thought and calculation, it must also prove its suitability to all trading purposes through a longer practical employment; and, finally, all improvement and systematisation, readjustments and rejections, should be gradual alterations, aiming at the perfect development of the original system, without violent departures, or borrowing extraneous measures from other nations.”

The blunder of dislocating home trade for the sake of a few exporters, received attention in an unexpected quarter, and I cannot do better than give the following extract from one of Piazza Smyth’s works:—“Having heard rumours upon rumours perseveringly spread through this country, to the effect that Russia was on the eve of adopting the French metrical system, I wrote lately to Mr. Otto Struve the Imperial Chief Astronomer at Pulkova, near St. Petersburg, and received from him the information that some years ago there had been a little talk about the project, though it was soon after entirely dropped on finding ‘that the proposed change would be to the advantage only of a few hundreds of merchants, mostly foreigners, but to the damage of seventy millions of Russian subjects. ' This,” says Smyth, “is in fact the true way of looking at the question of any national metrology, for it is a something which refers