22 APRIL 1949, Page 5

" Advocates of a fixed Easter," writes The Times, " will

be study- ing precedents and are likely to look with a particularly favourable eye on the third week of April." Actually advocates of a fixed Easter, of whom I am emphatically one, can't really invoke this year's marvellous festival in support of their case ; no clear inference, I believe, can be drawn from the weather-records of the last quarter of a century or so. But all the other arguments which led the two Houses of Parliament in 5928 to put on the statute-book an Act fixing Easter Day as " the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April" are as valid as ever they were. That reform, with the consequential result of fixing Whit Sunday (and, what some people think more important, Whit Monday) on a date at the very end of May, would enable the August Bank Holiday to be pushed on, as large sections of the community seem to desire, to the begin- ning of September, without leaving too long a space of summer days Bank Holidayless. Next year, as it happens, the abstruse combination of Dominical Days and Golden Numbers will give us an Easter Sunday on the very date fixed by the 1928 Act—the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. It only needs an Order in Council to keep it at that. Why not issue one ?