It has also been rightly pointed out that foreign commerce is carried on, generally speaking, by comparatively highly educated people, who are generally better able to arrange such differences as there may be, than the humble people who deal from one part of the country to the other, and who cannot so well understand those differences with the latter. The struggle for existence is already sufficiently severe, without adding the complications a change would unnecessarily create.
The situation has been well expressed by Herbert Spencer in these words:—“The vast majority of our population consists of working people, people of narrow incomes, and the minor shopkeepers who minister to their wants. And these wants daily lead to myriads of purchases of small quantities for small sums, involving fractional divisions of measures and money—measuring transactions probably fifty times as numerous as those of the men of science and the wholesale traders put together. These two small classes, however, unfamiliar with retail buying and selling, have decided that they will be better carried on by the metric system than by the existing system. Those who have no experimental knowledge of the matter propose to regulate those who have! The methods followed by the experienced are to be re-arranged by the inexperienced!”
CHAPTER XI.
Home Traders' Interests not Considered.
Professor De Morgan, while assenting to the proposition that a change to the metric system might prove of benefit to foreign commerce, believed that it would create such an
