Holly and mistletoe there will
be in the Municipal Eating Rooms, but the men and women who sit down
there to General Cessation High-Tea will be glowing not with a facile
affection for their kith and kin, but with communal anxiety for the
welfare of the great-great-grand-children of people they have never
met and are never likely to meet.
"The great event of the day will be the performance of the ceremony of
'Making Way.'
"In the Dawn, death will not be the haphazard affair that it is under
the present anarchic conditions. Men will not be stumbling out of
the world at odd moments and for reasons over which they have no
control. There will always, of course, be a percentage of deaths by
misadventure. But there will be no deaths by disease. Nor, on the
other hand, will people die of old age. Every child will start life
knowing that (barring misadventure) he has a certain fixed period of
life before him--so much and no more, but not a moment less.
"It is impossible to foretell to what average age the children of the
Dawn will retain the use of all their faculties--be fully vigorous
mentally and physically. We only know they will be 'going strong' at
ages when we have long ceased to be any use to the State. Let us, for
sake of argument, say that on the average their facilities will have
begun to decay at the age of ninety--a trifle over thirty-two, by the
new reckoning.
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