The page he had opened it at was headed "General Cessation Day," and
he began to read....

"The re-casting of the calendar on a decimal basis seems a simple
enough matter at first sight. But even here there are details that
will have to be thrashed out....

"Mr. Edgar Dibbs, in his able pamphlet 'Ten to the Rescue,'[1]
advocates a twenty-hour day, and has drawn up an ingenious scheme for
accelerating the motion of this planet by four in every twenty-four
hours, so that the alternations of light and darkness shall be
re-adjusted to the new reckoning. I think such re-adjustment would
be indispensable (though I know there is a formidable body of opinion
against me). But I am far from being convinced of the feasibility
of Mr. Dibbs' scheme. I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to
stay--anomalous though it certainly will seem in the ten-day week,
the fifty-day month, and the thousand-day year. I should like to have
incorporated Mr. Dibbs' scheme in my vision of the Dawn. But, as I
have said, the scope of this vision is purely practical....

[Footnote 1: Published by the Young Self-Helpers' Press, Ipswich.]

"Mr. Albert Baker, in a paper[2] read before the South Brixton
Hebdomadals, pleads that the first seven days of the decimal
week should retain their old names, the other three to be called
provisionally Huxleyday, Marxday, and Tolstoiday. But, for reasons
which I have set forth elsewhere,[3] I believe that the nomenclature
which I had originally suggested[4]--Aday, Bday, and so on to
Jday--would be really the simplest way out of the difficulty.