only the much less special honor of a birth-year. Not that he
begins his separate existence otherwise than is the custom of
mortals generally, at a definite instant of time, but that very
little subsequent notice is ever taken of the fact. On the contrary,
from the moment he makes his appearance he is spoken of as a year
old, and this same age he continues to be considered in most simple
ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next calendar year.
When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is credited with
another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day is a
common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary
for his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and
Korea. Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth
up at least one year and possibly two older than one really is,
it lies beyond our present purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident
that woman has had no voice in the framing of such a chronology.
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. The first of them is called the
festival of girls, and commemorates the birth of girls generally,
the advent of the universal feminine, as one may say. The second is