Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/785

Rh the use of tables to be distributed, will reduce them to metric quantities in their statement of their vouchers, receipts, and accounts, which will, it appears to me, be a perfectly useless labor.

"2. This reduction, involving additional calculations and transfers from one set of units to another, unfamiliar and much less convenient, will infallibly be the source of many mistakes, to the loss of the disbursing-officer of the Treasury, or of the person who sells supplies to the United States.

"3. It will be necessary, in order to make the operation of such a law really successful, to throw away all the hay-scales and other platform scales whose beams are now divided according to the American standard units of weight, and all the rules and measures divided according to the yard, foot, and inch, and all the weights, pounds, ounces, or grains, of avoirdupois, troy, and apothecaries' weight, and to purchase, distribute, and substitute new scales and new weights according to the metric system. These changes will be expensive. The trouble and labor I do not speak of, as such labor will, in case of the passage of a law, simply be the duty of all officers and employees of the United States.

"4. If the metric system is made obligatory in government transactions and not in transactions between individuals, then continual confusion and misunderstanding will be caused by the use of one standard by the Government and another by the people. All packages are put up by merchants, manufacturers, and producers in accordance with the actual legal standards, pounds, ounces, grains, yards, feet, inches. The transactions of the United States, large as they are, are insignificant compared with those of private trade. Manufacturers and consumers, and the people, will not change their customs at the call of the officers of the United States.

"In regard to making the metric system obligatory in transactions between individuals:

"1. I do not believe that this is within the power of Congress. It will be looked upon by the people as an arbitrary and unjust interference with their private business and individual rights, and I do not think that they will submit to it. It will inflict, if it can be enforced, a great loss upon many, especially upon manufacturers and mechanics whose shops are filled with costly tools, standard gauges, dies, and machines, all constructed upon the basis of the foot and inch.

"Every geared lathe in the United States depends upon a screw of a certain number of threads to the inch, and all the screws it produces are gauged in pitch and diameter by the inch.

"The metre is not commensurate with the inch, foot, or yard; all reductions are approximate only. The law of July 27, 1866, makes the use of the metric system permissive, legal, but not obligatory, and establishes for the reduction of metres to inches, and the reverse, the ratio of one metre to thirty-nine and thirty-seven hundredths inches, which is not absolutely correct. To alter all this machinery, to change