Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/789

Rh people if they are compelled to use a system so materially different from that employed by other English-speaking people. These inconveniences would only be reduced to the minimum, if, by an international convention between the United States and Great Britain, a mutual agreement were entered into to bring the system simultaneously into use among all English-speaking people. Unless some such international arrangement can be effected, I think it would be wiser for the friends of the metric system to remain for the present content with the law which has legalized its use by those who may find it well adapted for their own particular work. If it possesses the great advantages claimed for it over the older system, its use being already authorized by law, it will gradually extend until it has crowded all others out of existence, and no further legislation than that already had will be necessary to secure ultimately its general introduction. If, however, its advantages are so far counterbalanced by its disadvantages, at some of which 1 have briefly hinted, that, its use having been legalized, the people will not employ it of their own accord, its enforced introduction would be a great public wrong."

The Commissary-General of Subsistence reports: "I have the honor to state in reply to the first branch of the inquiry covered by the resolution, that to make obligatory, in government transactions, the metrical or any other system of weights and measures not in use by the people, and consequently not familiar to or generally understood by them, would not only involve great confusion and great extra labor in making reductions from the system in use by the people to the system adopted for the Government, but I believe that the people would look with grave suspicion upon government transactions based on a system of weights and measures which they did not understand; and that to adopt a system exclusively for the Government would have a tendency to remove the Government further from the people, and weaken, if not nearly destroy, their confidence in the integrity of the officials and agents of the executive departments.

"To the second branch of the inquiry covered by the resolution, I would respectfully submit that I not only believe great detriment would ensue from the adoption of the metrical system exclusively for the use of the Government, but that it would be, also, inexpedient for the United States to make the system obligatory between individuals, unless in cooperation with Great Britain, with whom we are so intimately connected by language, literature, and commerce.

"The change to a new system of weights and measures, based upon units widely different from and incommensurable with those upon which the system now in use is based, must necessarily require a great effort, and should be preceded by a long period of preparation, say twenty years. Even with the most thorough preparation, the change, when made, will bring with it almost inextricable confusion and wellnigh intolerable inconvenience, however superior to the existing system the