f longitude
without greater proof of the positive necessity of the change. It
would not be the fiat of this Conference, or the fiat of any
government, that would bring about the change. I say this with all
deference to the opinions of those who have advocated a change.

General STRACHEY, Delegate of Great Britain. At the risk of repeating
somewhat my remarks made to the Congress when we last met, I would add
a few words to what has now been said. It is our wish that the points
of real difference should, as far as possible, be clearly brought out
before the Conference comes to a vote.

As regards the counting of longitude in two directions, and the degree
of advantage or disadvantage that may arise in starting from zero and
treating east longitude as positive or plus, and west longitude as
negative or minus, let me ask the attention of the Congress to the
fact that longitude is already counted in these two directions, and
that, as a matter of fact also, latitude is counted in the same way,
in both directions from the equator, north latitude being plus and
south latitude minus. Nobody, so far as I have heard, has ever
proposed that we should abolish this method of reckoning latitude, and
substitute for it North or South polar distance, to be counted right
round the earth; and yet there is the same _quasi_ scientific
objection to the present method of counting in the one case as in the
other. As already stated, it seems to me that, for purposes of
practical convenience, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to separate the ideas on which the reckoning of longitude must be
based, from those which must regulate the reckoning of time, and
especially the reckoning of time in the sense of adopting a universal
day over the whole world. Now, it appears to me that, as regards the
acceptance of the universal day, it certainly will be anything but
convenient, if it begins and ends otherwise than when the sun passes
the 180th meridian. On the contrary, I think it will be extremely
inconvenient. I think that if the world were to adopt the meridian of
Greenwich as the origin of longitude, the natural thing for it to do
would be to have the international day, the universal day, begin from
the 180th meridian from Greenwich--that is, to coincide with the
Greenwich civil day. That meridian passes, as I said before, outside
of New Zealand, and outside of the Fijee Islands; it goes over only a
very small portion of inhabited countr