Repeatedly repulsed, the French siege will not cease its attacks; England, and America also, must be prepared to meet them.
Although the English-speaking peoples have a system with which they are satisfied, unfortunately few know its principles; and, in weights and measures as in other matters, an inferior article well advertised supplants an old-established and satisfactory article that is not advertised. If the French people have not revolted long ago against the system imposed on them by the Paris bureaucracy, it is because it is thoroughly advertised as scientific, international, and as conquering the world by the superior civilisation of the French nation. They have been trained to make almost any sacrifices for the glory of France, and so long as they can evade the decimal and other inconvenient portions of the metric system they suffer this patiently for the satisfaction it gives to their patriotic feelings.
But their government must go on conquering, or they may strike against a system which brings in no more glory; as other peoples may when they see that the English-speaking peoples of the world refuse to be persuaded into accepting it.
Here is the weak point of the attack. And when the English-speaking peoples, those of the British Empire and America, are as well instructed in their good system as the peoples of the metric countries are in the bad system imposed on them (and which they evade for all the good teaching of it), the assailants will raise the siege.
We could reply: Amend your own system and make it acceptable to your own people before you ask us to put aside a system which we find convenient and which is founded on better principles than ours. Our system has been carried to all countries; it is decimal wherever decimalisation is convenient; its international unit is the Ton-register of 100 cubic feet, or 100,000 ounces, as old as the first civilisation of the world, as the civilisation which established the Meridian mile used by your seamen as by ours. We reject an artificial system founded in hatred of the past, and only kept up in its native country by police-force. In the name of decimals you want us to abolish our pound, and use a kilogramme which your own people will not use. It should be enough for you that we have given your system a denizenship by the abuse of which we have been greatly annoyed.