The druggists’ price lists give quantities in units of 30, 125, 250, 500 grammes or cubic centimetres, that is in quantities of 1, 4, 8, 16 ounces; and these are the quantities in which he usually sells drugs to his customers.
Thus in France there is a chronic struggle between the law and the people; the system of weights and measures was devised there, not for the convenience of the people, but to suit a decimal theory dear to the mathematical and bureaucratic mind; the people must make their convenience fit the system, and it is only by evasions and subterfuges that it can be made to fit, even approximately. The trader has to evade the law if he wishes to retain his customers. The manufacturer, not keeping an open shop, finds evasion easier, and all the circulars addressed by the government to Chambers of Commerce begging them to support the metric system remain without effect. A few months ago a circular deplored the practice of selling and buying silkworms’ eggs by the ounce. Recently a circular forbade professors and schoolmasters to utter the names of the old weights, measures or coins, or to allow their pupils to utter them.
The instances I have given of the failure of all the efforts to make the French people take to the metric system are entirely from my personal observation. I conclude them with an extract from Messrs. Halsey and Dale’s ‘The Metric Fallacy’ (New York, 1904) on the failure to convert manufacturers to the system:
The reasons for the failure of this colossal effort of a century to change the textile weights and measures of France is not difficult to find. The ideas of length, area, volume and weight are as firmly grounded as any that find a lodging in the mind of man. They are bound to the records of the past, to the work of the present, and to the plans for the future. They are ineffaceably imprinted upon the mind of every child to regulate his ideas of extension and weight as long as life may last.
These natural conditions are alone sufficient to account for the failure of the metric system in France. Other influences have however served to make the failure more complete in the textile industry. The metric system needed something more than the transcendent mathematical faculties of its designers to make it suitable for textile measurements.