1. Calling it ‘antiquated,’ a term which might be applied to Law, to Religion, to Marriage, to Property, and other ancient institutions.
2. Calling it ‘irrational,’ when it has that great reason which comes from custom, convenience, improvement in recent times.
3. Calling it ‘unscientific,’ when it joins to popular convenience the option of decimalisation, whenever that is found convenient, in addition to the alternate decimalisation already established in several series.
4. Putting forward as current certain weights, such as the Troy pound, long ago obsolete.
5. Putting forward as legal measures trade-units, such as the cask, the sack, &c., used for convenience in trade, as much in metric countries as with us.[[60]]
6. Putting forward, as necessary, sums and calculations which a decently taught schoolboy would laugh at.
7. Ignoring all that is convenient in our system and all that is inconvenient in the metric system.
8. Ignoring the satisfaction of the people of the United States with our system, even when retaining the old wine-gallon and corn-gallon.
9. Ignoring the resistance of the French people to the metric system after a century of education in it and of police-constraint.
10. Urging us to follow the example of other countries that have adopted it, but omitting to find out whether the peoples of these countries, from civilised Germany to barbarous Haïti, use it—so far as they do use it—otherwise than under compulsion. It is the governments of these countries, not the people, that have adopted it, always in the name of Science; and the day police-pressure were taken off, the old system would return, or, at the least, the decimal series would disappear.