Today, I wish to call your attention, to the Dozenal Society. Who are they? I do not wish to be alarmist, but they are dedicated to replacing our ancient and well-proven base-ten method of counting, with counting by the base of twelve. The international legitimacy of the metric system moves them not at all, these mathematical Jacobins: Twelve they must have. Twelve, indeed. They reason is that twelve is more easily factored than ten, but in our modern age of computers, that is nonsense. Surely, a computer could very easily find a way, to divide ten by three or by seven and get a whole number out of it. They are very clever, those boffins with their computers, and you won't see them messing about with strange radices.

Besides, you do not need to divide numbers by three, because two is company and three, is a crowd. If there are three at supper, that is one too many, or one too few, and in any case, the host should pay the bill without vulgarly dividing it among the party. The trouble is not with the currency, or with the numbering. It is with your own ill-breeding. You need to accept that it is you who have done wrong, and not the Treasury at all.

But it is worse than that. They say,

...the next really useful number [is] sixty, but this latter number is rather too large to be chosen as an every-day number base.

Well you know who counted by sixty, do you not? The Babylonians, that is who, and the Mayans or the Aztecs or one of those, and no doubt many other nations of perfectly alarming savages. And you can see, that sixty, is their ultimate goal: They defer it, merely on grounds of practicality, but quite surely as soon as they are able, they will be teaching your children the customs of ancient Babylonia, at the public expense.

Please, consider the children. It would not do to go back to the bad old days of farthings, and groats, when the lower classes could not use money because there were too many coins for them to understand, the poor ignorant creatures.