found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts
of things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.

"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.

"Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides, where is the money to come
from?"

"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.

They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where people
would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and cut
flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so
stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually
confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that the
flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over.

These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local
affairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has
resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for
children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs
all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting them
out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to
educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.

Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club of
Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagons
and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.

"Those children," Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have a
decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
trouble about getting the sixty together. Th