Experience has proved that the central service of bookkeeping can, without any disturbance, be placed every day in relation with all the post-offices, and the accounts be kept to date notwithstanding the apparent inextricable complexity of all this correspondence and of all these various operations.
The instruments intended to facilitate the two classes of operations in which the Savings Bank and the Postal administration will intervene in the interest of the adherents:—the collection on behalf of the latter, the payments in or the payments in discharge are the object of special bye-laws. In this direction still, and in this direction especially we shall be able to learn from experience. Perfected instruments, as the Empfang Erlag Schein, the certificate of payment in and of deposit, the cheque-books of payment and of clearing with the ingenious measures taken to baffle every fraud have been well tried in Austria and Hungary and there would be no longer any peril in adopting them.
A metallic reserve sufficient to satisfy all immediate wants ought to be secured. Experience has proved that this condition is to be realized without difficulty.
The establishment of a service of cheques and clearing may lead to a more considerable flow of capital to the Savings Bank.
This has been the result in Vienna and has been in fact the very thing the Viennese legislation wished to bring about. But, on the one hand the investments continue without ceasing to increase: for example, the extent of the advances connected with agriculture and land which will be solicited of the Savings Bank or in which it will participate cannot be measured; on the other hand it is possible to exercise regulative and limiting action on the deposits in making a difference in the rates of interest given to depositors; it is possible to go the length of suppressing all interest; to this end special arrangements with reference to deposits belonging to the cheque and clearing service will be made in carrying out the law.
Such is the economy of a proposition in itself modest and simple, which we have no hesitation to submit to the Chamber. If we make an effort to conceive what in the future will be the evolution of an apparatus so marvellously flexible as the Savings Bank, we may fairly expect from a combination of the service of cheques and clearing with that of investments, of the association of special organs,—such as Mahillon speaks of,—with the central organism of the Bank, a powerful co-operation in the legitimate effort to eliminate metallic money from our circulating system. But without inquiring, now, what may occur in a future perhaps alas still remote, in only occupying ourselves with the production of present good, it has seemed to us in the general interest to solicit the Chamber to establish a service of which decisive experiences have fixed the essential conditions and shown the efficacy, and of which the link is as manifest with our democratic evolution as with the higher forms of credit and circulation.
FOOTNOTES:
[T] Sitting of December 2nd 1896. Parliamentary Documents No 29.