It is the use by our modern progressive country of an ancient system of weights and measures which it is here proposed to discuss and show up as an absurdity. Our present system is organized and set forth in arithmetics under some fifteen so-called "tables." These tables are all different and there is no uniformity in any one table. Only one unit suggests convenience in reductions, viz., hundredweight. It is easy to reduce from pounds to hundredweight and vice versa. Some fifty ratio numbers have to be memorized or calculated from other memorized numbers to make the common needed reductions. History shows that ancient Babylonia had tables superior to those now in use, and ancient Britain a decimal scale which was crowded out by our present system. The metric system of weights and measures was developed in France about 1800 and has come to be employed over all the civilized world except in the United States, Great Britain and Russia. The system was legalized in the United States in 1866 but not made mandatory and here we are fifty years later using the old system, with most of the civilized world looking on us with more or less scorn because of our belatedness. In this age everywhere the cry is efficiency, always more efficiency. Ten thousand improvements and labor-saving devices are introduced every day. But here is an improvement and labor-saving device which would affect the life of every person in the land and in many instances greatly affect such persons' lives, and yet almost no one really knows anything about the matter. So let us now consider the good points in the metric system (each implying corresponding elements of great weakness in the common system), and then study briefly what stands in the way of its adoption in this country. These good points are: First, the metric units have uniform self-defining names (cent, mill, meter and five more out of the eleven terms used already familiar to us in English words), are always the same in all lands, known everywhere, and fixed with scientific accuracy. Second, every REDUCTION is made almost instantaneously by merely moving the decimal point. There are no reductions performed by multiplying by 1,728 or 5,280, etc., or dividing by 5 1/2, 30 1/4 or 31 1/2, etc., and hence there is A GREAT SAVING in the labor and time of making necessary calculations. Third, there are but FIVE tables in the metric system proper, these taking the place of from twelve to fifteen in our system (or lack of it). These are linear, square, cubic, capacity and weight. Fourth, any one table is about as easy to learn as our United States money table, and after one is learned, it is much easier to learn the others, since the same prefixes with the same meanings are used in all. Fifth, the weights of all objects are either known directly from their size, or can be very quickly found from their specific gravities.