Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/407

Rh it shall be the legal standard of weights and measures of the United States.

Should Mr. Shafroth's bill become a law, it is practically certain that a similar act will be passed by the British parliament soon afterward. Experience in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other European countries within the last thirty years affords the assurance that, while temporary inconvenience may be expected, the transition will be soon accomplished in all important commercial centers; that persons of middle age and advanced years who have had no previous familiarity with the metric system will continue to use that to which they are accustomed; that the younger generation will everywhere appropriate and appreciate it; and that the agricultural population will be the last to become adapted to the change. Concerted opposition to the metric system by many whose capital would suffer depreciation by change is to be expected. The powerful influence of conservatism will be hard to overcome, however strong may be the arguments of those having commercial interests with Europe and South America. The passage of the metric bill may be again delayed. But the United States has become an exporting country and this necessitates two important changes. One is the removal of unnecessary tariff barriers to foreign trade. The other is the adoption of a system of weights and measures that is equally suited to domestic and foreign trade. Those who have been opposed to the recent American policy of forcible annexation of foreign countries have the partial compensation of knowing that it gives a strong impulse to the unification of weights and measures for the entire world. There may be honest difference of opinion among the advocates of the metric system regarding the advisability of assigning so early a date as 1906 for the legal establishment of this system in our country. Probably all of them will agree that 1905 is not too early a date for the exclusion of the old system and adoption of the new in the different departments of the government. The people will thus be induced to learn the metric system practically and compare its simplicity with the complexity of the system to which they have been accustomed. The opposition to it hitherto has come chiefly from those who have no practical acquaintance with it. They are quite excusable for thinking best to 'let well enough alone,' just as the majority of Englishmen would object to substituting our simple American system of decimal currency for their cumbrous system of farthings, pence, shillings, pounds, crowns and guineas. It is well to remember, moreover, that existing conditions in England and America are quite different from those under which Bismarck introduced the metric system into the newly formed German empire. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Mexico to the Arctic circle, there is but a single system of weights and measures, which has some few good features with its many bad ones, and which is