Excerpt from A Record of the Metropolitan Fair: In Aid of the United States Sanitary Commission, Held at New York, in April, 1864 IN the Autumn of 1863 it came to be felt that no more effectual way of raising money for the needs of the Sanitary Commission could be devised than by holding Fairs. Chicago by this means was enabled to give sixty thousand dollars at once to the bene cent fund which previously had been supplied by small con tributions. Not that the aggregate of contributions was small; the streams of benevolence that owed into the common reservoir of the Sanitary Commission were countless and never dry, but they were mere rills when compared with this Chicago ood of bounty. So it was not long before Boston, a city which readily catches a new idea, followed with another bazaar, and from it realized one hundred and forty thousand dollars. The success of the new idea, one grand gift in place of numberless small ones, was now, of course, fully estab lished. The name Sanitary Fair was coined, and applied to each of that splendid series of bazaars, whose number and magnificence made a memorable feature of the winter of 1863 - 4 in the loyal North. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."