THAT A MAN BECOMES OF AGE ON HIS 

 TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY 



HIS might be regarded rather as an error of 

 speech than as a fallacy of thought were it not 

 that the same erroneous idea has been carried 

 into other conceptions and has given rise to 

 serious error which has sometimes been of a practical 

 nature. 



When a man reaches his twenty-first birthday it is 

 evident that he has lived only twenty full years. On his 

 first birthday he was just beginning life and it was only 

 on his second birthday that he reached the age of one 

 year. The same difference between the number of his 

 birthdays and the number of his years continues all his 

 life, and it is only on his twenty-second birthday that he 

 has lived out the twenty-one years which entitle him to 

 vote in this country and which confer upon him all the 

 rights and privileges of adolescence. 



The same discrepancy appears in the numbering of the 

 centuries and it is no uncommon thing to hear the seven- 

 teenth century spoken of as the sixteenth because it ran 

 from 1601 to 1699, only the last year (1700) having 17 

 before the other two figures. Indeed I have seen in print, 

 under the authorship of one who must certainly have 

 known better, the seventeenth century named when the 

 eighteenth was what was intended. 



It was not until the close of 1900 that the nineteenth 

 century rounded out its full quota of years, and it was 



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