The gradual adoption of the metric system by countries of all degrees of civilisation from Germany and Italy to Venezuela or Haïti, has not been from any desire of the people of those countries for it, except an infinitely small minority of scientists who desire that the whole world should use the system found convenient in international scientific reports, and a somewhat larger proportion of enthusiasts with high and unpractical cosmopolitan ideals. Many also acquiesce from the same motive which induces people to buy a well-advertised and puffed article instead of one to which they had been accustomed and had found satisfactory. They undergo the contagion to which the crowd-mind is so subject. In England a few genuine enthusiasts, and many more who have caught the scientific and cosmopolitan craze, take to the metric system as they take to learning Esperanto, and so long as they have not to use the one in business or the other in conversation, their enthusiasm lasts, especially when it affords opportunities for showing themselves friends of science and progress. But when the contagion spreads so wide that it threatens to revolutionise the habits and customs of a nation and its whole manufactures and trade, the danger is most serious. 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._ Footnote 57: 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.