Page:British Weights and Measures - Superior to the Metric, by James W. Evans.djvu/54

46 whole world is regulated. Although there does not appear to be any probability of the metric system coming into common use in Canada, there are reasons for believing that it will become the international system, and that there will be but two systems—the French and the English.” The very wide-awake people of the United States, we may be sure, would not hesitate one moment in making a change if they deemed it beneficial. That they do not is a tribute to the sufficiency of the one they work by. One writer reasonably argues that “when the preponderance of commerce is French, it may become advisable to adopt French measures and monetary units in foreign trade; until that time it is certainly unnecessary, while for purposes of trade it would be a mischievous innovation.”

In dealing with this subject, the chief aim has been to discuss it in terms which can be readily understood, to keep it free of intricacies which repel those, other than students, who happen to take up text-books upon metrology. In some of these works, fantastic reasonings are occasionally encountered. There are those who deplore the suggested change because it would deprive us of that valued form of intellectual gymnastics, mental arithmetic, mechanical forms of calculation taking its place. Some condemn the French system on the ground that it is offensive, by reason of its supposed atheistical origin. Another objects to our hereditary measures being ruthlessly discarded, because he believes them to have been preserved almost miraculously to the