Surely, out of this large fund of earnings, the working classes might easily save from thirty to forty millions yearly. At all events, they might save such an amount as, if properly used and duly economized, could not fail to establish large numbers of them in circumstances of comfort and even of comparative wealth.
The instances which we have already cited of persons in the humbler ranks of life having by prudential forethought accumulated a considerable store of savings for the benefit of their families, and as a stay for their old age, need not by any means be the comparatively exceptional cases that they are now. What one well-regulated person is able to do, others, influenced by similar self-reliant motives, and practising like sobriety and frugality, might with equal ease and in one way or another accomplish. A man who has more money about him than he requires for current purposes, is tempted to spend it. To use the common phrase, it is apt to "burn a hole in his pocket." He may be easily entrapped into company; and where his home provides but small comfort, the public-house, with its bright fire, is always ready to welcome him.
It often happens that workmen lose their employment in "bad times." Mercantile concerns become bankrupt, clerks are paid off, and servants are dismissed when their masters can no longer employ them. If the disemployed people have been in the habit of regularly consuming all their salaries and wages, without laying anything by, their case is about the most pitiable that can be imagined. But if they have saved something, at home or in the savings bank, they will be enabled to break their fall. They will obtain some breathing-time, before they again fall into employment. Suppose they have as much as ten pounds saved. It may seem a very little sum, yet in distress it amounts to much. It may even prove a man's passport to future independence.
With ten pounds a workman might remove from one district to another where employment is more abundant. With ten pounds, he might emigrate to Canada or the United States, where his labour might be in request. Without this little store of savings, he might be rooted to his native spot, like a limpet to the rock. If a married man with a family, his ten pounds would save his home from wreckage, and his household from destitution. His ten pounds would keep the wolf from the door until better times came round. Ten pounds would keep many a servant-girl from ruin, give her time to recruit her health, perhaps wasted by hard work, and enable her to look about for a suitable place, instead of rushing into the first that offered.
We do not value money for its own sake, and we should be the last to encourage a miserly desire to hoard amongst any class; but we cannot help recognizing in money the means of life, the means of comfort, the means of maintaining an honest independence. We would therefore recommend every young man and every young woman to begin life by learning to save; to lay up for the future a certain portion of every week's earnings, be it little or much; to avoid consuming every week or every year the earnings of that week or year; and we counsel them to do this, as they would avoid the horrors of dependence, destitution, or beggary. We would have men and women of every class able to help themselves—relying upon their own resources—upon their own savings; for it is a true saying that "a penny in the purse is better than a friend at court." The first penny saved is a step in the world. The fact of its being saved and laid by, indicates self-denial, forethought, prudence, wisdom. It may be the germ of future happiness. It may be the beginning of independence.
Cobbett was accustomed to scoff at the "bubble" of Savings Banks, alleging that it was an insult to people to tell them that they had anything to save. Yet the extent to which savings banks have been used, even by the humblest classes, proves that he was as much mistaken in this as he was in many of the views which he maintained. There are thousands of persons who would probably never have thought of laying by a penny, but for the facility of the savings bank: it would have seemed so useless to try. The small hoard in the cupboard was too ready at hand, and would have become dissipated before it accumulated to any amount; but no sooner was a place of deposit provided, where sums as small as a shilling could be put away, than people hastened to take advantage of it.
The first savings bank was started by Miss Priscilla Wakefield, in the parish of Tottenham, Middlesex, towards the close of last century,—her object being mainly to stimulate the frugality of poor children. The experiment proved so successful that in 1799 the Rev. Joseph Smith, of Wendon, commenced a plan of receiving small sums from his parishioners during summer, and returning them at Christmas, with the addition of one-third as a stimulus to prudence and forethought. Miss Wakefield, in her turn, followed Mr. Smith's example, and in 1804 extended the plan of her charitable bank, so as to include adult labourers, female servants, and others. A similar institution was formed at Bath, in 1808, by several ladies of that city; and about the same time Mr. Whitbread proposed to Parliament the formation of a national institution, "in the nature of a bank, for the use and advantage of the labouring classes alone;" but nothing came of his proposal.
It was not until the Rev. Henry Duncan, the minister of Ruthwell, a poor parish in Dumfriesshire, took up the subject, that the savings-bank system may be said to have become fairly inaugurated. The inhabitants of that parish were mostly poor cottagers, whose average wages did not amount to more than eight shillings a week. There were no manufactures in the district, nor any means of subsistence for the population, except what was derived from the land under cultivation; and the landowners were for the most part non-resident. It seemed a very unlikely place in which to establish a bank for savings, where the poor people were already obliged to strain every nerve to earn a bare living, to provide the means of educating their children (for, however small his income, the Scottish peasant almost invariably contrives to save something wherewith to send his children to school), and to pay their little contributions to the friendly society of the parish. Nevertheless, the minister resolved, as a help to his spiritual instructions, to try the experiment.
Not many labouring men may apprehend the deep arguments of the religious teacher, but the least intelligent can appreciate a bit of practical advice that tells on the well-being of his household as well as on the labourer's own daily comfort and self-respect. Dr. Duncan knew that, even in the poorest family, there were odds and ends of income apt to be frittered away in unnecessary expenditure. He saw some thrifty cottagers using the expedient of a cow, or a pig, or a bit of garden-ground, as a savings bank,—finding their return of interest in the shape of butter and milk, winter's bacon, or garden produce; and it occurred to him that there were other villagers, single men and young women, for whom some analogous mode of storing away their summer's savings might be provided, and a fair rate of interest returned upon their little investments.
Hence originated the parish savings bank of Ruthwell, the first self-supporting institution of the kind established in this country. That the minister was not wrong in his anticipations, was proved by the fact that, in the course of four years, the funds of his savings bank amounted to nearly a thousand pounds. And if poor villagers out of eight shillings a week, and female labourers and servants out of much less, could lay aside this sum,—what might not mechanics, artizans, miners, and iron-workers accomplish, who earn from thirty to fifty shillings a week all the year round?