VIII. Municipal Reform Organizations.
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.