With his usual skill in getting at the meat of the matter, Bacon described Time as “the measure of business.” The measurement of time itself, in its practical application to everyday affairs, is now under serious consideration by most of the nations of the world in the hope that its compuation may be put on a more businesslike basis.

What have been described and classified as the “undisputed effects” of the present calendar are the unequal lengths of the months, the incessant changing of day names for the same dates in different months, and the inconvenience for school, court, holiday, and general business purposes of an Easter which swings about in an irregular manner and within the ambit of an arbitrary system, for a period of thirty-five days.

The project most favoured to overcome all these defects is that known to the Assembly of the League of Nations as project “C.”

This project is based on the lunar month, and seeks to establish thirteen equal months of twenty-eight days each. Following June would come the new month, “Sol,” to be succeeded by July. The choice of the name “Sol,” by the way, seems to show that even in the world-wide time measurement scheme, its northern projectors have suffered from a hemispheric superiority complex. “Sol”—the sun month—follows June. That is all right for the northern hemisphere. But—if the name means anything—it should follow December in the southern hemisphere.

The spare day left at the end of a 28-day December is to be called “Year Day,” and when Loap Year comes this day is to be inserted at the end of June as “Leap” day.

The whole scheme seems very alluring, particularly to railwaymen in this country. We have been working on 28-day periods for our accounting almost since the inception of our system, but it has always required some calculation or reference to instructions to know at any time just how the month stood in relation to the railway “period.” Under the new system Sunday would always be the first, eighth, fifteenth or twenty-second day of the month, and so with each of the other days. Thus the last day (the twenty-eighth) of the month would always fall on a Saturday. The watchmaker's task, to make watches shew the day and date as well as the hour, would be quite a simple matter under this new system. Consulting calendars would be practically unnecessary page 7 when measurement in time had been reduced to regularity of this description.

The Gregorian calendar certainly served its purpose, since its universal acceptance in 1528, in preventing the years slipping out of step with the seasons, but the inconvenience of the monthly diversities, having been tolerated through four hundred years, could quite easily be avoided by an adaptation to meet modern business requirements, and without, we should think, any popular agitation such as moved the mob to cry “give us our eleven days” when the Gregorian arrangement was decided upon for England.

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