24 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



The good savings banks accomplish is very much over esti- 

 mated. 



The statistics of amounts deposited are often taken as an ex- 

 hibit of savings which would not otherwise be made. 



The probability is that almost all that ever appears on the 

 books of a savings bank would have existed as savingi?, only it 

 would be loaned out in such ways that no statistician could 

 reach it. 



A thing that will astonish you, as you become acquainted with 

 the depositors in a broken savings bank, is not the number of 

 imbeciles that have been ruined, but the number of intelligent, 

 capable, saving people that have been duped. Some of us can 

 remember a generation of factory-girls who made close savings 

 when no savings banks were within their reach. 



The first spare money that came into the New Hampshire town 

 in which I was raised, was the savings of our factory girls. Al- 

 most every home took on a new appearance from the surpluses 

 sent back by the girls at work in the factor}'-. When fathers and 

 mothers got in a pinch for money to keep a boy or girl at school, 

 the first re'ort was to the savings of the factory-girls. 



These young women were their own bankers. They did not 

 ask any favors of savings banks. They found out to whom it 

 was safe to loan and to whom it was not. They knew whether a 

 man who sought to borrow their earnings had a mortgage on his 

 farm or a chattel mortgage on his stock, and, if so, for how much 

 and to whom. Some of these women remaining single and man- 

 aging their own funds came to possess the large fortunes of their 

 locality. 



]Now what a savings bank would have done for these factory 

 girls would simply have been to make them babes in finance 

 instead of self-sufficing bankers. 



It would have led them to surrender to others an intellectual ex- 

 ercise in the highest degree profitable to themselves. Their earn- 

 ings would have gone into a vast aggregate to be swallowed up 

 by a kite-flying banker in the " down east " speculation which did 

 ruin so many venturesome capitalists; and the clapboards and 

 shingles would have rattled in the wind on the old houses which 



