One would hardly imagine that man had either, so astronomic is the system.

A communistic age is however but an unavoidable detail of the general scheme whose most suggestive feature consists in the subordination of the actual birthday of the individual to the fictitious birthday of the community.

For it is not so much the want of commemoration shown the subject as the character of the commemoration which is significant.

Some slight notice is indeed paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their observance is quite secondary in importance to that of the great impersonal anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the fifth day of the fifth moon.

These two occasions celebrated the coming of humanity into the world with an impersonality worthy of the French revolutionary calendar.