The Citizens' Association.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19148, 3 November 1927, Page 8

The Citizens' Association.

It will be the public themselves who will pay if the effort of the Citizens' Association to counteract Socialism fails through lack of support. The

object of the Association is simply to restore the City to its most representative citizens. It has been perfectly frank both with its supporters (active and passive) and with its opponents, and in the account which it gave of itself in our columns yesterday—it will have more to say in later issues—it did not conceal or attempt to conceal its past blunders, or make light of the task it knows it now has to face to undo the failure of last April. It needs, and specifically asks for, the assistance of "every thinking " citizen whose municipal creed is the " antithesis of the vague and predatory "creed of Socialism." As the Tramway Board election is only three weeks away, its immediate task is to secure the return of a genuinely competent body of tramway managers, and the adoption of a progressive tramway policy, and it is a task which will require a good deal of energy. But the most interesting and most hopeful thing it has undertaken to do is to remain alive and awake. It is not going to be all bustle for a fortnight or so before a poll, and then leave the field. In the meantime it is holding fortnightly general meetings, in addition to special meetings of the committee, but it will still continue after the tramway poll to meet at intervals and keep continuously at work right up to the municipal elections of 1929. That is a bolder.and yet more cautious programme than the Association has ever adopted before, and it must succeed if it is followed with intelligent interest by the general body of citizens.