“Yet of course there must be holidays.  We can no more do without holidays than without sleep.  For every man there must be certain stated intervals of repose—­of recreation in the original sense of the word.  My views on the worthlessness of classical education are perhaps pretty well known to you, but I don’t underrate the great service that my friend Professor Ezra K. Higgins has rendered by his discovery[5] that the word recreation originally signified a re-creating—­i.e.,[6] a time for the nerve-tissues to renew themselves in.  The problem before us is how to secure for the human units in the Dawn—­these giants of whom we are but the foetuses—­the holidays necessary for their full capacity for usefulness to the State, without at the same time disorganising the whole community—­and them.

[Footnote 5:  “Words About Words.”  By Ezra K. Higgins, Professor of
  Etymology, Abraham Z. Stubbins University, Padua, Pa., U.S.A. (2
  vols.).]

[Footnote 6:  “Id est”—­“That is.”]

“The solution is really very simple.  The community will be divided into ten sections—­Section A, Section B, and so on to Section J. And to every section one day of the decimal week will be assigned as a ‘Cessation Day.’  Thus, those people who fall under Section A will rest on Aday, those who fall under Section B will rest on Bday, and so on.  On every day of the year one-tenth of the population will be resting, but the other nine-tenths will be at work.  The joyous hum and clang of labour will never cease in the municipal workshops....

“You figure the smokeless blue sky above London dotted all over with airships in which the holiday-making tenth are re-creating themselves for the labour of next week—­looking down a little wistfully, perhaps, at the workshops from which they are temporarily banished.  And here I scent a difficulty.  So attractive a thing will labour be in the Dawn that a man will be tempted not to knock off work when his Cessation Day comes round, and will prefer to work for no wage rather than not at all.  So that perhaps there will have to be a law making Cessation Day compulsory, and the Overseers will be empowered to punish infringement of this law by forbidding the culprit to work for ten days after the first offence, twenty after the second, and so on.  But I don’t suppose there will often be need to put this law in motion.  The children of the Dawn, remember, will not be the puny self-ridden creatures that we are.  They will not say, ’Is this what I want to do?’ but ’Shall I, by doing this, be (a) harming or (b) benefiting—­no matter in how infinitesimal a degree—­the Future of the Race?’

“Sunday must go.  And, as I have hinted, the progress of mankind will be steady proportionately to its own automatism.  Yet I think there would be no harm in having one—­just one—­day in the year set aside as a day of universal rest—­a day for the searching of hearts.  Heaven—­I mean the Future—­forbid that I should be hide-bound by dry-as-dust logic, in dealing with problems of flesh and blood.  The sociologists of the past thought the grey matter of their own brains all-sufficing.  They forgot that flesh is pink and blood is red.  That is why they could not convert people....