The favour which the metric system has found amongst a small proportion of English people is largely due to their ignorance of their own system, an ignorance very excusable when there exists no official statement of our system, or even of its standards. The people are left to the information afforded very badly in school-books and scarcely better in almanacks. So our system is left without defence against the attacks made on it by well-meaning persons who do not know it, and by the never-ceasing action of the French government.[57] It may therefore be interesting to see
_How far the French have adopted the Metric System._
Aided greatly by the Alliance Française, an association formed, under government patronage, ‘to extend the political and moral power of France ... and make pacific conquests abroad by its superior civilisation.’ Every member of it abroad is bound to promote this cause.
A century of official pressure, of state-education, and of police proceedings against any public selling, marking or crying of goods otherwise than in metric measures and coins, cannot be without some effect, especially in large towns, but even there, while accounts are kept and bills made according to the legal system, the people, as distinguished from the official classes, have never taken to it, and in the country it is nearly entirely ignored, out of official transactions, both in weight and measures and in money.
The sizes of baskets and flower-pots are in _pouces_; lamp-chimneys have their size marked on them in _lignes_. The size of printer’s type is in points, each 1/6 line or 1/72 of the old French inch; and the printer’s pocket-rule is divided on one side into centimetres but on the other into ‘Ciceros’ corresponding to the English ‘pica.’
Barometers for ship-use have their scale usually in pouces and lignes. The port barometer on the quay of the great naval port of Toulon, in front of the town-hall, is on this old scale. In 1909 I found the barometer of a new Transatlantique passenger steamer making her first voyage to be ‘selon Torricelly,’ with its scale in the old _pouces_, 28 = 29·87 English inches.
The sounding line of French ships is in brasses of 5 old French feet, the cable is of 120 brasses, the knot is, as with us, 1/120 of the nautical mile of 1852 metres; the kilometre being absolutely ignored.