Philosophy does not despair of this triumph at some distant day; but a common system of weights and measures and a common system of money are already within the sphere of actual legislation.
Charles Sumner
The Public Record
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
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The bills before you have already passed the other House; if they become laws, as I trust, they will be the practical commencement of the “new order.
They are essential to the operations of society, and are naturally common to all who belong to the same social circle.
At the beginning, each people had a system of its own; but as nations gradually intermingle and distant places are brought together by the attractions of commerce, the system of one nation becomes inadequate to the necessities of the…
A common system becomes important just in proportion to the community of interests.
These measures were derived from Nature, and they were to be found wherever a human being existed.
Even in Greece, where Art prevailed in the most beautiful forms, the famous stadium was none the less uncertain.
Our own standards, derived from England, are of an equally fanciful character.
The question naturally arises, why such confusion has been allowed so long without correction.
Each nation is attached to its own imperfect system, as to its own language.
Even though inferior to another, it has the great advantage of being known to the people that use it.
To this constant impediment it is proper to add the intrinsic difficulty of establishing a uniform system of weights and measures which shall satisfy the demands of civilization in scientific precision, in immediate practical…
Take, for instance, the application of the decimal system, which seems at first sight simple and complete.
It is unquestionably an immense improvement on the old confusion; but even here we encounter a difficulty in the circumstance, long since recognized by mathematicians, that our scale of decimal arithmetic is more the child of chance than…
On this account it is often called “natural.” But, considering whether the number ten possesses any intrinsic excellence, convenience, or fitness, as a ratio of progression, good authorities have answered in the negative.
A system of weights and measures born of philosophy, rather than of chance, is what we now seek.
A chance system cannot be universal: science is universal; therefore what is produced by science may find a home everywhere.
There is but one magnitude in Nature which, so far as we know, approximates to these requisites.
I refer to the length of the pendulum vibrating seconds, which in our latitude is about 39.1 inches.
There is something transcendental in the idea of this measurement of the earth in order to find a measure for daily life.
If there be an error such as is supposed, then the metre ceases to be what it was called originally, one ten-millionth part of the distance from the equator to the north pole.
Even assuming that there is no error, and that the metre is precisely what it purports to be, yet it is not easy to see how the artificial standard can be corrected by recurrence to the standard in Nature.
Therefore, for all practical purposes, the metre is really nothing else than a bar of platinum with a certain length preserved in the archives of France.
It is not less arbitrary as a standard than the yard or foot, and it can be perpetuated in practice only by distribution of exact copies from the original bar, which is the assumed metre.
I have thus explained the origin and character of the metre, because I desire that the admirable system founded on it should be seen actually as it is.
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