“The five-hundredth and last day of each year shall be a General Cessation Day.  It will correspond somewhat to our present Christmas Day.  But with what a difference!  It will not be, as with us, a mere opportunity for relatives to make up the quarrels they have picked with each other during the past year, and to eat and drink things that will make them ill well into next year.  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.  That, then, will be the period of life fixed for all citizens.  Every man on fulfilling that period will avail himself of the Municipal Lethal Chamber.  He will ’make way’....

“I thought at one time that it would be best for every man to ’make way’ on the actual day when he reaches the age-limit.  But I see now that this would savour of private enterprise.  Moreover, it would rule out that element of sentiment which, in relation to such a thing as death, we must do nothing to mar.  The children and friends of a man on the brink of death would instinctively wish to gather round him.  How could they accompany him to the lethal chamber, if it were an ordinary working-day, with every moment of the time mapped out for them?

“On General Cessation Day, therefore, the gates of the lethal chambers will stand open for all those who shall in the course of the past year have reached the age-limit.  You figure the wide streets filled all day long with little solemn processions—­solemn and yet not in the least unhappy....  You figure the old man walking with a firm step in the midst of his progeny, looking around him with a clear eye at this dear world which is about to lose him.