It has already been pointed out that the labourer finds it possible to support the Union with small payments, and also to subscribe to benefit-clubs.  The fact suggests the idea that, if facilities were afforded, the labourer would become a considerable depositor of pennies.  The Post-office Savings Banks have done much good, the drawback is that the offices are often too distant from the labourer.  There is an office in the village, but not half the population live in the village.  There are far-away hamlets and things, besides lonely groups of three or four farmhouses, to which a collective name can hardly be given, but which employ a number of men.  A rural parish is ’all abroad’—­the people are scattered.  To go into the Post-office in the village may involve a walk of several miles, and it is closed, too, on Saturday night when the men are flush of money.

The great difficulty with penny banks on the other hand is the receiver—­who is to be responsible for the money?  The clergyman would be only too glad, but many will have nothing to do with anything under his influence simply because he is the clergyman.  The estrangement that has been promoted between the labourer and the tenant farmer effectually shuts the latter out.  The landlord’s agent cannot reside in fifty places at once.  The sums are too small to pay for a bank agent to reside in the village and go round.  There remain the men themselves; and why should not they be trusted with the money?  Men of their own class collect the Union subscriptions, and faithfully pay them in.

Take the case of a little hamlet two, three, perhaps more miles from a Post-office Savings Bank, where some thirty labourers work on the farms.  Why should not these thirty elect one of their own number to receive their savings over Saturday—­to be paid in by him at the Post-office?  There are men among them who might be safely trusted with ten times the money, and if the Post-office cannot be opened on Saturday evenings for him to deposit it, it is quite certain that his employer would permit of his absence, on one day, sufficiently long to go to the office and back.  If the men wish to be absolutely independent in the matter, all they have to do is to work an extra hour for their agent’s employer, and so compensate for his temporary absence.  If the men had it in their own hands like this they would enter into it with far greater interest, and it would take root among them.  All that is required is the consent of the Post-office to receive moneys so deposited, and some one to broach the idea to the men in the various localities.  The great recommendation of the Post-office is that the labouring classes everywhere have come to feel implicit faith in the safety of deposits made in it.  They have a confidence in it that can never be attained by a private enterprise, however benevolent, and it should therefore be utilised to the utmost.