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 88  the committee were promptly adopted by the school board. Arrangements are being perfected whereby some of the members of the committee will attend all meetings of the school board, and the committee meetings of the same.

The committee is also endeavoring to secure through the board of education the use of large halls in many of the school buildings, for monthly meetings of patrons and teachers, to be called parents' councils, the object being to arouse a greater interest in the public schools.

III. THE ORIGIN OF THE CIVIC FEDERATION.

This account of the form of organization of the Civic Federation and this synopsis of the work in which the Civic Federation has had a part, furnishes the occasion for pointing out facts beneath the surface, which make the experience of Chicago instructive. In order to bring out these facts it is necessary to tell more of the way in which the Civic Federation came to exist. It cannot be stated too emphatically that the Chicago civic revival, and particularly the organization of the Federation, marked a stage in orderly civic evolution. This step in evolution was accomplished both through the power of latent energy and as a result of certain external impulses. It was not however in a large degree or in an important sense, the work of external agencies or of mechanical contrivances. The visible impulse which led to effective organized expression of civic consciousness in Chicago was a mass meeting called at Central Music Hall, Sunday, November 12, 1893, by Mr. William T. Stead, of London. It was a mere accident, however, and not at all significant, that this spark which ignited the material already collected was struck by a stranger and a foreigner. The more important fact is that long before this incident, prominent Chicago citizens had given much attention to plans for municipal organization to do work that the city government was notoriously unlikely to perform. But previous to this agitation of the subject by a few prominent citizens, there had been for years much argument and appeal in Chicago for more intelligent municipal action. There had been concentrated effort on a small scale and confined to