The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the

i86o-3] SAVINGS BANKS. 365
the department in issue or payment but three-halfpence,
every transaction in the savings bank, whether of
deposit or withdrawal, costs sevenpence.*
The full evil of such increase in current expense
will appear when it is considered what, under strictly
economical management, these savings' banks might
become. Their chief avowed object is, and most
assuredly should be, to give the largest justifiable
encouragement to popular thrift ; and to this, as I
conceive, every other aim should be completely subordinated.
To this end it is important to induce, by
all reasonable means, the greatest amount of deposit,
but incomparably less important,
if indeed at all
desirable, to give more than reasonable facility for
withdrawal. Certainly there is no just ground for
extending and multiplying such facility at the expense
of the department ; especially seeing that the neces-
sary consequence
whose amount constitutes a main inducement to de-
is a reduction in that rate of interest
positors ; so that the effect is to mulct the steady
depositors for the convenience of the more changeable.
Had the Post Office been able to offer the same rate
of interest as the old savings banks,
its absolute
security, combined with a reasonable and inexpensive
increase of facility for the transaction of business,
would not only have soon brought to it the whole
actual amount of the savings bank business, but in all
probability
would have so extended that increase in
thrift, which, with all defects, it has actually produced, as
to make it correspond with the hopes of the most zealous
advocates of the new scheme, and in particular of the
* According to the Postmaster-General's Report for 1879, every transaction
costs 7*550'. exclusive of postage; while "the Yorkshire Penny Bank (an oldestablished,
widely-spread and very thriving institution) does its work (I am
informed) at 2d. per transaction." ED.