NOTHING PRIVATE.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2715, 24 June 1925, Page 9

NOTHING PRIVATE.

(By M. Stevenson.) During the past few years one more quality haS become unfashionable. To possess the trait of reticence dooms one as humdrum and dull, or earlyVictorian in the most derogatory sense. The world has no patience with reticence —it takes too long to be understood; and the plea is all for fx-ankness, that judgment may be formed without waste of time. So candor in many forms is the result. Wc are candid to our friends and foes alike; candid about our work and our homes, about our moi*als and our dress, about insides and outsides —about everything. It has come to such a pass that we must be candid to bo considered at all. We must have no scruples in revealing our inmost thoughts and making public the intimate details of our lives and others. We talk freely and frankly of all subjects under the sun and with as much indifference as we can muster.

And if our candour lays bare the unpleasant more often than the pleasant, well, we flatter ourselves that we are able to see life as it Is, the bad and the good.

This certainly has its merit, if it is only that of airing the mind of the frowzy ideas of our forefathers, and sweeping away the cobwebs of ignorance.

As we practise it in small ways, it is practised on a larger scale in the trains, on the buses, and, in the towns. The flight of reticence is broad cast. Mattel’s that once would have been discussed and decided in the seclusion if our own minds and homes are now "kindly solved for us.

From gigantic hoardings is inverted advice as to the clothes we should wear the face-creams and powders we should use, the food wo should oat, the medicines we should take afterwards, the way in which we should buy our furniture, and borrow the mouey to pay for it, and & hundred other things, and all done in an intimate colloquial manner that would have caused our grandmothers to blush by its intimacy. How some of the modern advertisements wonul have appalled the fragile mentality of those modest creatures who thought it indelicate for a gentleman to mention such articles as stockings in the presence of a lady! Fortunately, wo have progressed beyond the fatuity of such ideas, but it does seem as if privacy of any sort were in jeopardy, and in an age of hustle and competition of aeroplanes and radio, wc can • hardly dare to hope that it will be our possession in the future.