"IT WILL DRIVE US MAD"

When a few days ago some two hundred million people were cheated out of theirteen days of their lives by the change of the Orthodox Greek Churches from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, the fearful wail that must have gone forth can easily be imagined by the Daylight Saving "grousers" At the same time it may have reminded people of what an arbitrary and imperfect thing the Gregorian calendar is. Although Caesa, and Pope Gregery put it inot fair harmony with the solar year, it is full of odd quirks. For instance it begirs on January first instead of with the vernal equinox because the Renaissance advanced the entrance of the consuls into office, their official opening of the new year, to get some respectable generals for a war. Then Easter depends upon the full moon, not because the Jewish Passover did, but because at the time of the Council of Nicea, navigators going to Jerusalem for the fast needed moonlight for night sailling.

In view of these irregularities, business is anxous for a standardized calendar--week days falling always on the same date and movable feasts made immovable. To do this there would have to be thirteen months of twenty-eight days each with one (or two) days left out in the cold. But is America to be dictated to by business, to put an efficiency expert in the presidential chair? If all environment is pressed into a regular pattern, then human beings will be only paper figures and geniuses and charming women will no longer exist. Rather let easter move from early March to late April and February twenty-ninth come but once in four.