The third year of the National Reform League has been completed with
results full of encouragement to the members of the various social
organizations of which it is composed. Its annual meeting at Louisville,
Ky., was attended by one hundred and fifty delegates. Much of the
success of the widely extended work represented by this national
organization is due to the persistent and unselfish activities of its
able secretary, Mr. Clinton Rogers Woodruff, of the Philadelphia bar,
who closed his address before the convention with these encouraging
words:
In every direction the outlook is bright and promising, not of the
immediate fulfilment of all the hopes and desires of those who are
most deeply interested perhaps, but of substantial progress and
steady growth. The sentiment for better government is gaining day
by day. It is not a movement for a particular form of local
government or of specific panaceas for municipal evils, but rather
one to bring the citizens, those who are primarily responsible, to
a fuller appreciation and a more general discharge of the duties of
citizenship--in short, a movement for citizenship reform. The
indifference and apathy of the average voter have been a matter of
general comment. To overcome this, and to replace it with that
interest and that action without which no permanent reform can be
accomplished, the realization that good government depends for its
very existence upon good men, is the fundamental basis of municipal
reform. Charter revision, civil-service rules and regulations, fair
elections, and an honest count and return are all important; but
they depend for their success upon sound public opinion, and that
depends upon good citizenship. Good laws are important; good
citizenship is essential.
The Good Citizenship League of Minneapolis adds to the means of its
increasingly useful work by the publication of a carefully edited little
periodical under the title of _Facts_, in which information that might
not otherwise reach them in proper form is placed before all citizens.
E. F. Waite is President, and Alfred Sherlock, Secretary, with offices
at 254 Hennepin Avenue.