Life Insurance^ Savings Banks^ Etc. 23 



The man who loans the bank a small sum is welcomed. The 

 man who wants to hire a small sum is recommended to the pawn 

 broker. 



The aggregate sum in a savings bank is just so much money 

 removed from the possibility of use among the poor and handed 

 over to the rich to help them widen the distance already separat- 

 ing the poor and the rich. It is so much contribution to specula- 

 tion under whose influence the value of wages is uniformly 

 depressed as against the commodities the laborer needs to buy. 



It is easy enough to see the road over which the savings banks 

 have gone to the wide-spread ruin which is their recent history. 



Many littles have made much ; and the bank officers have 

 found themselves in position to enter into operations to which, 

 wild times and greedy ambition invite. 



Before any war of labor against capital, there has been a war of 

 capital agamst capital — capital bidding against itself for the sup- 

 posed profits of great enterprises. 



If the best of these great enterprises could not be secured the 

 next best must be and so on. The best has proved to be none 

 too gof)d, and the rest it is useless to try to characterize. 



The poor in putting their surpluses into savings banks, have 

 simply been standing idly by while capital has been employing their 

 earnings in this interesting game of outwitting itself and them. 



A savings bank for the poor is a great " How not to do it." 



Men of small means need accommodations as well as those en- 

 gaged in larger enterprises. 



If an institution is for the benefit of the poorer classes, they 

 ought to have a chance to get something out of it as well as to 

 put something into it. This want a savings bank, if managed 

 with ever so good intent, cannot in practice meet. 



A radical fault in the savings bank system is that it is an at- 

 tempt to relieve the poor from the necessity of taking careof their 

 own funds — from the exercise of their own brains upon their 

 own finances. Tiie system promises to take care of the poor when, 

 they should be taught to take care of themselves. It prevents 

 the poor from using what the naturalist would call the providen- 

 tial instinct. 



