1.How many thousands of times every day are yards of stuff measured off and pounds of goods weighed out!At every counter of every shop in every town in England,Scotland,and Ireland this is going on every hour of the day.
2.Did you ever wonder how it is that our yard is always just three feet and our pound always just sixteen ounces?Old measures and old weights wear out,and new ones must be made;and if somebody once made a mistake,it might be copied over and over again,and so our yard would gradually get too short or our pound too heavy,and you would get too little print for your dress or too much meat for your dinner.
3.Britannia has been very much afraid that this might happen,and so she has thought of a plan for keeping things right.(Britannia is just another name for old England,and you will find a portrait of the lady on that penny in your pocket:she holds the trident of Neptune in her hand,and her shield bears the Union Jack.)4.This is the way that Britannia has taken care of her weights and measures.It is not enough for her that there are standard weights and measures kept in every town,and that shopkeepers must have theirs compared these from time to time.
5.More than forty years ago she had a bar of bronze made,and two lines marked on it exactly a yard apart,and this was sealed up in an oak box.Then a block of platinum,a very valuable and very hard kind of metal,was cut,weighing exactly a pound.This block was wrapped up in a kind of smooth paper that would not rub it in the least;and then it was placed in a silver-gilt case,and that case in another of bronze.
6.Outside that again it was protected by three boxes-two of wood and one of lead;and then a nice little niche was made for the block and the bar in the wall of the staircase of the House of Commons they were safely built up.
7.All this was done in 1853;and since then the bar and the block have been taken out three times,to see that Britannia was making no mistake in weighing her tea and measuring her calico.The last time was in 1912,and many wise people met together to see the weight and the measure tested .
8.They were delighted to find that our yard and our pound,in common use all over the country,were exactly like this bar of bronze and this block of platinum-that is,they weighed and measured the same within the ten-thousandth part of a grain and the hundred-thousandth part of an inch!Another examination will be made twenty years later,in 1932,and no doubt Britannia will then find her standard weights and measures quite as exact.
9.Let us hope that Britons will always be as careful to be true and just and fair in all their dealings,as they are to keep their measures and their weights correct!We are commanded not only to use just weights and measures,but,while we are diligent in business,to remember that with the same measure that we mete to others it shall be measured to us again.