Commenting on a letter received from an auditor, who said, “I had to go over more than £20,000 of accounts yesterday, and was very thankful that it was not in francs,” Herbert Spencer has pertinently asked, “By whose advice is it that the metric system of weights, measures, and values is to be adopted? Is it by the advice of those who spend their lives in weighing and receiving payments for goods? Is it that the men who alone are concerned in portioning out commodities of one or other kind to customers, and who have every minute need for using this or that sub-division of weights or measures, have demanded to use the decimal system? Far from it. I venture to say that in no case has the retail trader been consulted.”
If, however, the tens of thousands of retail traders have not been so demonstrative as Decimal Associations, some in touch with them indicate that they do not view the metric scheme with favour. For instance, Mr. A. J. Street, Chief Inspector of Weights and Measures for the City of London, has declared that retailers are very much against a change, and fairly pointed out that the wholesale trade, great as it is “must be multiplied in an enormous ratio to give any idea of the volume of retail trade.”
Mr. Alfred Spencer, chief officer of the Public Control Department of the London County Council, when asked for his views, said that the position of affairs in the United Kingdom was different to that in, say Austria and Germany, where the whole public suffered inconvenience from the complicated and conflicting systems in vogue. The absence of that enormous inconvenience gave no cause for such demands from Britishers; and, agreeing with Mr. Street, he
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