Отрывок из книги
A. G. Macdonell
Published by Good Press, 2021
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It is an important boast of the citizen of Manhattan that his streets possess the simplest, the most logical, the most practical system of identification in the world. The Avenues run north and south and are numbered from One to Thirteen; the streets run east and west and are numbered from One to One Million, as the case may be. The corners are all right-angles, the intervals between the streets identical. Therefore, cries the New Yorker, raising his voice a little in order to be audible above the sound of a passing elevated train, a simple calculation gives you the exact distance which has to be traversed on any journey between two known points, and furthermore the mere mention of an address at once establishes the exact position of that particular spot on the island. Complicated explanations are unnecessary. How much simpler than the elaborate postal districts such as plague the Londoner! How much simpler than the arrondissements of Paris! To this cry of triumph is often added a gentle suggestion that such efficiency, such practical modernity, is characteristic of the nation which long ago swept away the ridiculous coinage of England and substituted the metric dollar.
Both claims are beautifully absurd. The American, a sentimentalist to the core, clings passionately to the yard, the furlong, and the mile; he sells his wheat by the bushel and his cotton by the bale. There is no reckoning in kilo-bales on the Carolinian plantations, or kilo-bushels on the long plains of Nebraska. The tough placer-miner of the North-West reckons his gold-dust by the ounce, and that not even the simple ounce of his brother, the lead-miner of Missouri. Troy weight, with its minims and penny-weights, is the reckoning for the gold-miner in the logical New World as in the unpractical Old.
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