The Birmingham age-herald., 1915-06-13
ARE PEOPLES IDEAS
 GETTING SMALLER
By LAURA KINGSTON

Have you noticed that everything tends to become smaller nowadays? It is difficult to think of anything which has not shrunk, in the last few years. Houses, cameras, motor cars, letters. hats, motorcycles, books. dinners, churches, clothes-all these things, and many others, have shrunk.
 The big house has had it's day. The rambling old country mansions are sur vivals of a homely past when the house was indeed center of life. But now no one stops any longer in his house or grounds than necessary The old pride of home has died. The great idea now is to spend as little time there as possible. To travel. go along the roads, to dine and sleep in strange rooms is held to be better
 So smaller house with a garage will do. And instead of a big garden. Is there not the golf links across the rc ad or the lawn tennis club?
 Changes in photography show the same tendency very well. Ten years ago the photographer carried a half plate camera and tripod. He looked down with contempt on a smaller one. With the heavy camera slung over his back and his ungainly tripod un- der his arm, he would cheerfully tramp
 
 now the camera has shrunk to pocket size You put it in your pocket and ycu carry no tripod of any kind. The early motor cars were high | lacked things that would house fam l ily They have shrun< to the low touring car shaped to displace the min l imum of air, to the two-seater in which
 YOU sit, if of any size almost as if 1 in a vice, and even to the single scatter.
 1 The shrinking of motorcycles ia even ! more apparent Ten years ago one wrestled with heavy and enormous ma : | chimes, so high from the ground that
 ride was often serious adventure 1 But now everything Is smaller. The 1 frame is lower and lighter. The engine | is smaller The little lightweight is | quickly turning the big heavyweight off the road. Think of ordinary bi- | cycles, too. What a shrinkage from the huge Thigh ordinary" to the small 1 featherweight roadster of today. l Letters have shrunk to postcards. To | come across an old letter is like stumb ling on an ivy-covered Elizabethan | mansion Who writes a long letter | nc wadays? Who writes letter at all | if a postcard will do?
 l Books too. They have shrunk as | houses and hats have shrunk. The long | leisurely novel of 500,000 words, of COG l | into the thin novel of 60, 900 or S0,O0O | words. Occasional attempts are made 1 to revive the old three-deckers but the | great mass of modern novels are thin, | anaemic volumes that can be vsad Tn | an hour or so They have shrunk with | the times, though publishers have be- | gun to talk again of longer novels. l Eevryone who goes into an old 1 church wonders how such immense | places came to be built. They are ali ways several sizes too big for any present or past population. They stand | In desolate country places or remote villages as monuments-often neglect | ed-of reproach. You will never find
 a big new church. The church has 1 shrunk as the home has shrunk.
 Dogs are smaller. To be fashionable a dog cannot be too small. If 1t car | appear to have no legs at all so much tho better The dog is socially in dis | grace.
 Finally the whole universe seems tt
 shrink as inventions grow. The worl, is no longer big place. It has be
 come so small that new worlds are de manded, and no doubt there will com,
 time when even space will shrink int;
 suburbia.