During the interval, when the ball was kept rolling in this manner, Mr. Gladstone had amply fulfilled his promise to give the subject his best attention, as sufficiently appears from a letter which, belonging now to the history of Post Office Savings Banks, we append below.[164] Expressions of opinion on the advantage of some such scheme still continued to be sent to Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sikes, which must have encouraged them both to persevere, and which made it very apparent that the public had made up its mind not to allow the matter to drop—at any rate, quietly.
The most important petitions sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer emanated from Liverpool, Leeds, and York; but a resolution passed by the Dublin Statistical Society, presided over by Dr. Whately, the late Archbishop of Dublin, and signed by Dr. W. Neilson Hancock as secretary, deserves special notice, were it only for the weight attaching to Dr. Hancock's own name.[165] In answer to these and similar memorials, Mr. Gladstone seems to have generally replied that the matter was under his most careful consideration; “that he received with cordial satisfaction this expression of opinion, proceeding from persons well qualified to judge, and that he earnestly hoped it may be practicable to frame a plan by which the objects in view may be extensively attained.”
And now the curtain may be said to have fallen upon the scheme, and for fully twelve months it is beyond the public gaze, and entirely beyond public criticism. We find that now and then Mr. Sikes was busy during the period in answering objections to his plan, with as much energy and good sense as he had previously displayed in his advocacy of it, before he had the good fortune to enlist the services of Mr. Gladstone in its behalf. Now, however, it may be said to have passed out of his hands, and to have fallen into those of others, who, no way averse or unfriendly to his project, saw that it would be necessary largely to remodel it, in order to make it fit into the machinery, (of the working of which Mr. Sikes was necessarily ignorant,) upon which it would have to be engrafted. Furthermore, among much approving criticism of the scheme, there had been not a little feeling exhibited among influential organs of the public press, that Mr. Sikes had not gone far enough in his proposals, and that on some points the details were not nearly so liberal as they ought to be made. As an ardent friend to the Savings Bank system, Mr. Sikes had doubtless well considered the objections which Savings Bank managers were likely to urge; and, to stave off opposition on the part of many of his friends, had apparently sacrificed a detail here and there in a matter where boldness of action was most essential to success. If one thing is more clear than another in the history of our great reforms, it is that the projector who plunged right into the stream was always surer of ultimate success than he who paddled about in the shallows, or kept as close as possible to the brink. In this way, therefore, it seems to have come about that not only must modifications be made, but steps must be taken to perfect the plan, and present it in such a shape as a measure of reform as should silence cavil and complaint. Twelve months for such a work might seem long—might, indeed, be unnecessary; but few will say that the scheme,—so much remodelled as fairly to be considered a new one, did not amply atone for the delay.
The task of adopting Mr. Sikes's proposals just as they originally stood, and which proposals the Post Office authorities had generally acquiesced in, seems to have been abandoned on account of the practical difficulties which stood in the way; one of which Mr. Gladstone indicated in the letter we have already given. The object now, therefore, was to originate a mode of working altogether independent of Mr. Sikes's plan, in which the desirable modifications to be made in Mr. Sikes's scheme should also be introduced. Before, however, we show how this was eventually accomplished, it is necessary to say in what these important modifications consisted.
1. Mr. Sikes's scheme was proposed to be worked by a Commission who should preside over a central bank and employ the agency of the Post Office. Such a division of authority would have been unprecedented, and must have led to confusion and great expense, if even it could have been so arranged.
2. The Commissioners were to have been empowered to receive Money Orders as deposits and acknowledge them in the form of an expensive description of “Interest Notes.” The Money Orders and the “Notes” themselves would have required all the surplus interest to have been expended upon them, and there would have been little chance of the scheme turning out self-supporting.
3. Mr. Sikes proposed to open only 1,527 Money Order Offices as Savings Banks. He proved at great length that the system he proposed was not only the best, but the cheapest; yet at the solicitation, we believe, of several Savings Bank actuaries, he did not go the length of including any town where provision had been made for provident people. This, of course, restricted the inhabitants of 600 towns to the dearer mode of operation, though the cheaper one was shown to hold out anticipations of producing by far the best article. Such considerations could not, we should imagine, weigh with the Post Office when once the matter was taken in hand, and no arbitrary test of the above nature could ever have been entertained.
4. Most unsatisfactory, however, was the proposal to make 1l. the minimum sum that could be received. There were thousands of depositors in the ordinary banks whose average deposits were not half that sum. Moreover, the plan was designed to meet the wants of the poorest; to encourage and foster the habit of small savings among those who had not yet begun to save. No provision, therefore, could have been more unfortunate; and it is well that Mr. Sikes's fears—such as, that if a less sum were taken the measure would not pay—were soon shown to be groundless.
It is not our intention to trouble the reader with much detail as to what passed during the preparation, or, we may call it, the organization of this interesting and beneficent measure. It is, perhaps, sufficient to say, that differences of opinion rose upon it—that some of the authorities of the Post Office thought Mr. Sikes's scheme, with many important modifications, might be worked; while others of them held that no amount of alteration would enable the department to work it by means of Money Orders. In this way several months passed in discussion, and it is scarcely too much to say, that but for the unceasing vigilance of Mr. Gladstone, who continued to urge further efforts to overcome the natural obstacles that presented themselves, the temporary fate of many a good measure might have been the fate of this.
It was when matters were in this state of abeyance, and when the difficulties in the way fairly threatened to overwhelm the scheme altogether, that a gentleman, since prominently connected with all that relates to Post Office Banks, was induced to turn his attention to the subject. Mr. Chetwynd, one of the staff officers of the Money Order Office, took up the matter of applying the Post Office machinery to Savings Banks; and, discarding all the other plans for working then in dispute, addressed the Postmaster-General in November, 1860, and proposed a plan which he thought would, notwithstanding all the difficulties that had been experienced, meet all the reasonable requirements of the case. Mr. Chetwynd's scheme was based on the principle that Savings Bank business might be done “through the various Money Order Offices in a much more economical manner than by the issue and payment of Money Orders;” and that the plan should be so comprehensive as not to need the restriction which had been previously put upon it that sums under 1l. could not be received,—that sum, as Mr. Chetwynd truly said, being “so large as seriously to reduce the value of the benefit proposed to be conferred on the provident portion of the public.”