Nov. 9.
T'ax extraordinary figures men-i oned by Mr. Lloyd George in his letter to the guests assembled at the Guildhall to celebrate the Jubilee of the Post Office Savings Bank may well have occasioned doubt in the minds of some of our readers as to their accuracy. Yet the sum of £170,000,000 given as the aggregate amount of the deposits is supported by the statistics, and the King, while rejoining at "the steady expansion of a great national institution," emphasized also in his letter the invaluable service that the system is rendering to the nation. Since 1881 the amount of the deposits and the number of the depositors have both been more than doubled. The number of persons making uso of the Savings Bank now stands at nearly ten millions, and while that total may possibly represent not too large a proportion of those for whose benefit the system was inaugurated, it affords an indication be despised. It is frequently said that the English poor and lower fal in the world. Those who compared household methods in England and on the Continent have been forced to admit that there is a large measure of trath in the accusation. The defect in this particular respect is, perhaps, the inevitable outcome of national wealth and of a commercial supremacy long maintained unbroken. But in another direction an interesting comparison might be made, in respect of those branches of labour in which manual dexterity still counts for more than the use of complicated machinery on an extensive scale. For the work which " Chinese carpenter will accomplish, quickly and well, with an outfit which, practically speaking, ho can put in & pockd, Englishman requires a dozen or more of specially manufactured and expensive tools. In this, and similar instances the comparison is bardly in favour of the Englis! man. that economy and thrift might be But although it may be urged
far more extensively practised than bef are at present, it is impossible to deny that the scheme, in respect of the class's for which it was designed, must be adjudged on its merits a great success. Fifteen years after the inauguration of the Post Office Savings Bank the proportion of depositors to inhabitants of the United Kingdom was one to nineteen. That satisfactory result, it may be noted, was not the result of an initial experiment. Similar efforts had been made before, as the freit, in part, of a pamphlet Defoe, of "Robinson Crusoe ablished as long ago as 1704 by fame. The work was entitled iving alms no charity" and its author's theory, which in later years has received more serious attention, was that indiscriminate alms-giving was the chief cause of pauperism. At that time the notion of making people thrifty by Act of Parliament gained little favour, and a Bill giving permission for parish savin, banks, carried through the House of Commons in 1771, was rejected by the House of Lords. Various private savings banks met with little support, and it was not until the reign of George III that these institutions became incorporated in a Government scheme. In 1827 Treland and in 1835 Scotland were included in the scheme. But whereas in both these countries the scheme proved a failure, in England and Wal met with distinct success. So much so, indeed, that even after the institution of the Post Office scheme in 1861 the old savings banks continued in existence middle classes are the most waste- nitil 1876 when their total (capita)
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.