expected, the Decimal Association received in reply to their queries the answers which pleased them best. Some of the reports, however, gave somewhat unlooked for, and no doubt unpalatable, information. They indicate that it is not the absence of the metric system, but the negligence and want of enterprise on the part of many traders which have operated adversely to their interests. They do not always imitate the Germans, French, and Austrians in translating their trade circulars; nor take anything like the same trouble in approaching foreign clients with carefully prepared trade lists which will be intelligible—in fact, frequently exhibit indisposition to adapt themselves to the language and customs of the countries with which they wish to trade. Other manufacturers, on the other hand, spare themselves no trouble in this respect, and the latter will succeed, while the careless traders wail and blame our system for what has been caused by their own indolence. Herbert Spencer has tritely remarked that if merchants “are too idle, or too unenterprising to take the trouble needful for conveniencing their foreign customers, and if, consequently, they lose business, and are in danger of going to the wall, then the comment is—Let them go to the wall. We shall not benefit by an increasing population of incapables.”[1]
- ↑ NOTE—After this chapter had been written there appeared in Sydney Morning Herald, November 11, 1903, a letter from the London correspondent of that paper, in which he says that the British Acting Consul-General in Cuba had officially reported upon the diminution in British commerce there, stating:—“It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that where we have lost the trade in any particular article in this country, it is not generally because the foreigner has produced something better and cheaper, but because our own manufacturers have not taken the trouble to push the trade.”
