With regard to money, the gold napoleon being 20 francs and the franc of 20 sous, divided into 4 liards or half-farthings, the system was convenient. This practical though incomplete compromise was in force until 1837, when Louis-Philippe restored, on paper at least, the full republican system, except the measures of time. Yet the Napoleonic compromise held its ground, and indeed has lost little up to the present day, notwithstanding a more rigorous enforcement of the decimal system under the second Empire and the third Republic. About 1859 began the propaganda of the metric system abroad. Holland and Belgium, on which it had been imposed when those countries were seized by France in 1792 and 1795, retained it after the peace of 1814-1815; at least the old systems had been destroyed, and it was deemed best to retain the new one, so in 1821 it was compulsory. The new kingdom of Italy threw away the remains of its metric inheritance from ancient Rome when in 1859 it took the French system, partly perhaps from the apparent difficulty of co-ordinating the measures of the different states, but probably as part consideration for French help against Austria. Portugal adopted it, on paper at least, in 1863. The worst was when, in 1868, it was adopted by the North German Confederated States, and when in 1872 it was made compulsory. It is said that the governing powers of Germany, anxious to unify the diverse systems of its component states, took the fatal step in consequence of English official assurances that the metric system would soon be imposed on the British empire. After this disastrous surrender to international science, the governments of other countries, large and small, civilised and semi-barbarous, were easily induced by skilful diplomacy to impose the French republican measures on their peoples, heedless of the fact that all the persuasion and pressure of the French government had failed to get its own people to use the system whenever it could be evaded. Herbert Spencer says, of the progress of the metric system: When fifty years after its nominal establishment in France the metric system was made compulsory, it was not because those who had to measure out commodities over the counter wished to use it, but because the government commanded them to do so, and when it was adopted in Germany under the Bismarckian regime we may be sure that the opinions of shop-keepers were not asked. Similarly elsewhere, its adoption has resulted from the official will and not from the popular will.