The same year, 1864, saw the Civil Servants hold their first meeting - a meeting which still is an annual and important event; but it wanted yet a year or two before amateur athletics became general throughout the provinces as well as in London. In 1865 several football and cricket clubs promoted meetings, but it is not until 1866 that we hear of athletics being generally practised throughout the kingdom. By this time the amateurs had decided to have nothing to do with the professional 'peds' of the day, owing to the 'roping' and 'squaring' tactics of some of them which were notorious. At the beginning of 1866, when the Amateur Athletic Club was formed by some old University and London athletes, the prospectus announced that the club was formed to 'supply the want of an established ground upon which competitions in amateur athletic sports might take place, and to afford as completely as possible to all classes of gentlemen amateurs the means of practising and competing against one another, without being compelled to mix with professional runners.' The newly formed Amateur Athletic Club held a championship meeting in the spring of 1866, which was a conspicuous success, and this was the first of the long series which are still being continued under the management of the Amateur Athletic Association. The intention of the founders of the Amateur Athletic Club was no doubt to place their club in the same position with athletes as the M.C.C. stood to cricketers, and the design at first seemed to promise well, for the championship meetings were very successful, and in two years' time the club opened a splendid running ground for amateurs at Lillie Bridge, which immediately became the headquarters of amateur athletics.

The active athletes, however, continued to ally themselves more with the L.A.C. than the A.A.C., and the latter club soon ceased to hold any meetings but the championship.

It is hardly necessary, however, to pursue the history of athletics since the year 1866. By that year sports had been instituted in most of the large provincial towns as well as in many rural districts. 'The Athlete,' a record published in 1867, gives an account of nearly a hundred meetings held in England, and the same publication for the ensuing year shows that the number had then swelled to nearly a hundred and fifty. The progress of amateur athletics has since been rapid and continuous, and there is now hardly a single town throughout the country which does not have its annual athletic meeting. But by the year 1866 amateur athletics had definitely taken their present form, and though clubs have waxed and waned, and popular favour has ebbed and flowed at intervals, a generation of Englishmen has recreated itself with athletic sports in the same shape. The system of sports which had its growth in England has been successfully transplanted not only to Canada, Australia, and other British colonies, but to the United States; and it is now no rare event to find Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, Americans, and colonists competing together in the championship meetings of the Old Country.