Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/402

398 and cubic measures, and between volume and weight. This diversity is not so confusing as it might be, because the foot and inch are perfectly definite in value, and a pound is generally understood to mean an avoirdupois pound.

In 1790, the same year in which Jefferson presented to American legislators his decimal system of coinage, weights and measures, Prince Talleyrand in France distributed among the members of the Constituent Assembly at Paris a proposal to found a new system of weights and measures upon some natural and invariable standard, with the hope that it might become a world system and thus displace the multitude of complexities which constituted a serious barrier to commerce. The cooperation of Great Britain was particularly desired, and a special invitation was conveyed to the British parliament to send commissioners from the Royal Society for the purpose of conference with a similar commission from the French Academy of Sciences. The British government withheld even the courtesy of an acknowledgment. Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland were represented in the conference. The result is now too well known for special recital. The metric system of weights and measures was born amid the throes of the French Revolution. With the reign of terror it had nothing in common. It was a model of simplicity and consistency, but it had two important elements of weakness. The first of these is found in the fact that there had been no popular demand for it. The second is that it was based on the false assumption that an absolute and invariable standard can be found in nature. Each of these elements is worth consideration.

The function of legislation in connection with science is to utilize science for the general welfare only so far as the people are prepared to accept improvement. In a community where ignorance prevails even sanitary science can not be enforced for the saving of human life from pestilence, unless military despotism is substituted for local self-government until the causes of pestilence are eradicated. Water as clear and sparkling as the freshest dew-drop may contain in solution tasteless poison that spreads typhoid fever or cholera among the ill-informed skeptics who are unwilling to be taxed for their own protection. The French people knew nothing of the branch of applied science now called metrology. They felt no evils as the outcome of a multitude of unrelated weights and measures, incomprehensible to most of the world. The new decimal system was easy to brand as the fiction of doctrinaires, just as the taxpayers in a fever-stricken community denounce and resist the officers of the law who close an infected spring of water. The logical outcome of the French revolution was the military despotism of Napoleon, and by this means the metric system was forced upon an unwilling people. The generation on whom