WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.
THERE is nothing more illustrative of the growth of the social life of England than the system of weights and measures now in use. It is a huge tree, which has developed itself in the open air, under sunshine, wind, and rain, untouched by the scissors of art, and unbaissed by scientific culture. Nearly all the sovereigns and parliaments of Great Britain, from the Conquest to the present time, have tried to regulate and adjust this multiform produce of ages ; but it ever escaped their grasp, rewarding all attempts to create uniformity by shooting up in more luxurious disorder. It was enacted in Magna Charta that, "there shall be through our realm one weight and one measure," and the injunc- tion was repeated by royal and legislative edicts innumerable with the only ultimate effect that there are now at least a hun- dred different weights and measures. Every county, nay, every town and village in England, is happy in its particular standards of weight, capacity, and length. Slight difference in the latitude and longitude of a place will decide whether the measure called a bushel shall consist of 168 pounds, or 73 pounds, or 80 pounds, or 70 pounds, or 63 pounds, or only 60 pounds. The most universal article of consumption, wheat, is sold by the bushel of eight gallons at Saltash, in Cornwall, and of twenty stones at Dundalk, in Leinster ; it is sold, in towns near to each other, by the load of five quarters, by the load of five bushels, and by the load of three bushels ; by the load of 488 quarts at Stowmarket, in Suffolk, and of 144 quarts at Ulverston, in Lancashire. It is quite doubtful whether a so-called hundredweight shall contain 120 pounds or 112 pounds. By custom, a hundredweight of pork at Belfast is 120 pounds ; while at Cork it is 112 pounds. The most popular of all measurements, the bushel, is fluctuating from five quarters in some places to 488 pounds in others, the quarter itself being an unsettled quantity, varying no less than from 60 pounds to 480. Nor is it even settled what is meant by a mile. The English mile, is 1,760 yards ; the Scotch mile is one English mile and 217 yards ; and the Irish mile is one English mile and 480 yards. As to the:Smaller standards of weight and long th used in trade and commerce, they are almost endlessly diversbied. A grocer subdivides his pounds by 10; a goldsmith by 12, 20, and 24; and an apothecary by 12, 8, 3, and 20. Again, a firkin of butter is 56 pounds, and a firkin of soap 64 pounds ; while a bar- rel of soap is 250 pounds, but a barrel of gunpowder only 112 pounds. A sack of flour is 20 stone, and a sack of coal 14 stone, or 224.pouuds. But the little matter as to what the tt sal "stone" means is not at all settled, for a stone of butcher's meat or fish is 8 pounds, a stone of cheese 16 pounds, a stone of glass five pounds, and a stane of hemp 32 pounds. In sum total, there seem to be almost as many different weights and measures in this country as there are towns and villages and articles of commerce. It is the quintessence of individualism and self-gove.rument —enough, probably, to satisfy even Lord Stanley.
The history of the efforts made by successive governments, for the last six hundred years and more, to bring order and uni- formity into this state of things is as curious as amusing. In the long struggle of central authorities with the spirit of indivi- dualism, the latter invariably ended by getting the upper hand, and not only defeated the objects of the former, but turned them in the very opposite direction. Scores of parliamentary com- missions deliberated on the vexed question of weights and measures, and nearly every one finished the business by adding a few more to the multifarious standards already existing, instead of subtracting therefrom. The standards of measure and weight adopted by the people were always taken either from some part of the human body, such as the foot, the length of the arm, and the span of the handy or from some natural objects, such as a barleycorn, or other kind of grain. But the early English sovereigns ordered the adoption of the yard, supposed to be founded upon the breadth of the chest of our burly Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The yard continued till the reign of Henry VII., when the ell, being a yard and a quarter, or 45 inches, was introduced by the trading Flemings and the merchants of the Hanse Towns. Subsequently, however, Queen Elizabeth brought the old English yard back to its post of honour, and had an im- perial standard yard made of metal, and safely deposited in the Tower. After that, a series of parliamentary commissions began legislating upon the subject, increasing a hundredfold the con- fusion. Every generation saw a new standard springing up, based on the ever-changing size of barleycorns, or human feet and hands, and the ever changeable state of human minds. Finally, by an Act passed in 1811, the Legislature annihilated all preceding legislations, abolished all natural standards of hands and feet and chest, and recommended reference to certain pieces of metal "enclosed in a case, hermetically sealed and embedded within the masonry of some public building, the place to be pointed out by a conspicuous inscription on the outside, and not to be disturbed without the sanction of an Act of Parliament." But the standard pieces, and the masonry, and the conspicuous inscription were never made ; new parliamentary commissions took up the work of the old ones, changing it entirely ; and so the thing has gone on till the present moment, the last " select committee appointed to con- sider the practicability of adopting a simple and uniform system of weights and measures" having been nominated as recently as the month of May, 1862. 'The labours of this youngest-born of select committees have been, of course, severe ; and the evidence gathered in eighteen sittings was presented to the public in the shape of a tremendous blue-book of three hun- dred pages. It is about the fifteenth blue-book of the kind issued, and in whatever else parliamentary commissions may have been deficient, the literature of weights and measures which they have produced certainly weighs and measures something by this time.
In France, too, the confusion in weights and measures was great before the Revolution, but the Constituent Assembly of 1789 carried through a radical reform, as far as legislation was concerned, in the shortest possible time. The demand for uniformity being universally acknowledged, the Assembly, without further ado, re- solved to apply a remedy, and for this purpose requested the
Academy of Sciences to nominate a number of learned men who should settle the matter. They appointed five, among them the famous trio Lagrange, Condorcet, and Laplace, and their report was laid before the Legi:lature at the.end of a few months. The unit of length upon which they fixed was the ten-millionth part of the quadrant, or fourth of the meridian of the earth, which measure they proposed to call a metre, deducing therefrom, upwards and down- wards, on the decimal system, all other standards of length, weight, and capacity. 'The scheme was beautiful in theory, and irreproach- able from the philosophical point of view ; and though it was well known that its practical execution would be productive of many unwelcome changes and much monetary embarrassment, the Assembly at once adopted it, postponing, however, the operation of the law for some years. Meanwhile, steps were taken to diffuse information on the subject ; an immense quantity of tables and books were issued at nominal prices for the instruction of the general public, and everything was done to prepare the people for the coming change in the traffic of every-day life. A request had been previously sent to the English Government to co-operate in the great work, so as to bring about an international uniformity of weights and measures ; but the invitation was declined with thanks on this side of the Channel. The French people them- selves did not seem to admire the metric system at all in the com- mencement, and it took a long time before it found favour, par- ticularly with the lower classes. The law came into force on the 1st of July, 1794; but so great was the resistance against it, even at the end of eighteen years, that the Emperor Napoleon found it necessary to agree to a thorough change of the system at a moment when a widely popular measure was required of him. On the 12th of February, 1812, His Majesty issued a decree which virtually super- seded the law of the Constituent Assembly, and authorized in all retail transactions the use of the eighth, the sixteenth, and the fourth as divisors, and also the old standard of weights and measures which were still in use throughout France. There were, therefore, now two systems of weights and measures legally established in France ; and the two were used side by side for a quarter of a century, with the result that the philosophic metric system gradually got the upper hand, driving the old practical one out of the field. The victory of science over habit and custom having thus been satisfactorily established, King Louis Philippe, in 1837, passed another law, repealing that of 1812, and rendering it penal, not only to use the old system, but even to keep the old weights and measures in shops, warehouses, or offices. Since then the system of Laplace and Condorcet has had all its own way, and at the present moment no other is known, even in the remotest districts of France. Most of the Continental countries, among them Belgium, Holland, Sardinia, Tuscany, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Greece, have also adopted the metric system, and Russia is preparing to do the same. The Teutonic States of Europe, however, and with them Great Britain, have as yet with- stood the voice of science, and kept to habit and custom. It is an exemplification of the whole growth of Teutonic life—abhorring violence, and adhering to the slow development of time and nature.
The parliamentary commission which discussed during last session the whole question of weights and measures decided that England, too, shall accept the metric system ; but, under this proviso, "that no compulsory measures shall be resorted to until they are sanctioned by the general conviction of the public." To carry out the system, it is recommended that a "Department of Weights and Measures" be established in con- nection with the Board of Trade, entrusted with the conservation and verification of the standards, as well as the duty of making the metric system known to the public. To aid in this object, the Committee of Council of Education shall order the metric system to be taught in all the schools receiving Government grants ; and it shall furthermore be included in papers of competitive examinations for the civil service. Lastly, Govern- '. ment shall sanction the use of the metric system in the levying of
the Customs' duties ; shall publish the statistics of income and expenditure in terms of the metric system, and shall interdict the employment of any other weights and measures but the metric and imperial, "until the metric has been generally adopted." All these recommendations of the select committee are evidently based on the experience gained by the introduction of the decimal system in France, in the two periods of 1794 to 1812, and 1812 to 1837. The fear of entering the road of compulsory legislation is visible in every one of the revolutions, and goes to the extent of leaving even to the public the duty of giving names to the new weights and measures. On the important question whether the new stan- dards of measurement which are henceforth to be in legal use, side by side with the old ones, shall be denominated by the Greco- French terms in use among our Gallic neighbours, or be described in good English words, the select committee is absolutely mute. Yet it is in this that lies the real difficulty of the matter. It was
very justly observed by Mr. Drinkwater Bethune, one of '
parliamentary commissioners in 1841, that it is much easier tL
change values than to change names; and Mr. Quincey Adams made the same remark while inquiring into the decimal system for introducing it into the United States. The great repugnance of the French people, for more than twenty years, to adopt the new law of weights and measures, was not so much owing to the alteration in values and quantities, but to that of names, which fact is abundantly proved by the whole litera- ture on the subject published during the period from 1704 to 1812. But if the French did not like the long words "heck,- metre," "kilometre," " myriametre," "decimetre," and so forth, as denominating measures, and the words, "kilogramme," "kilolitre," &c., as describing weights, the English can far less be expected to adopt them with anything like goodwill. Even in France many of the old names of weights and measures are still in daily use, although, as already said, the new system has been completely adopted. What would seem, therefore, most reasonable, is that before intro- ducing metres and kilometres into this country, as proposed by the last parliamentary commis.sion, some idiomatic nomenclature should be settled and fixed upon, ready to be bestowed upon the strangers from abroad. The metric system, according to the select com- mittee, must inevitably come upon us, for the simple reason that our present non-system has become cumbrous and inconvenient, and that, as it would be unwise and almost impossible to invent a new one, all that remains is to adopt the system already in use over the greater part of Europe. "The metric system is ready made to our hands," is the sum total of parliamentary recommendations, which is undoubtedly true. But it is equally so that the Greco- Gallic names of the new system are by no means ready made to our tongues, and before gaining naturalization mill have to go through the old Anglo-Saxon mill.
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