It is not the highly-paid class of working men and women who invest money in the savings banks; but those who earn comparatively moderate incomes.  Thus the most numerous class of depositors in the Manchester and Salford Savings Bank is that of domestic servants.  After them rank clerks, shopmen, porters, and miners.  Only about a third part of the deposits belong to the operatives, artizans, and mechanics.  It is the same in manufacturing districts generally.  A few years since, it was found that of the numerous female depositors at Dundee, only one was a factory worker:  the rest were for the most part servants.

There is another fact that is remarkable.  The habit of saving does not so much prevail in those counties where wages are the highest, as in those counties where wages are the lowest.  Previous to the era of Post Office Savings Banks, the inhabitants of Wilts and Dorset—­where wages are about the lowest in England—­deposited more money in the savings banks, per head of the population, than they did in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where wages are about the highest in England.  Taking Yorkshire itself, and dividing it into manufacturing and agricultural,—­the manufacturing inhabitants of the West Riding of York invested about twenty-five shillings per head of the population in the savings banks; whilst the agricultural population of the East Riding invested about three times that amount.

Private soldiers are paid much less wages per week than the lowest-paid workmen, and yet they put more money in the savings banks than workmen who are paid from thirty to forty shillings a week.  Soldiers are generally supposed to be a particularly thoughtless class.  Indeed, they are sometimes held up to odium as reckless and dissolute; but the Military Savings Bank Returns refute the vilification, and prove that the British soldier is as sober, well-disciplined, and frugal, as we already know him to be brave.  Most people forget that the soldier must be obedient, sober, and honest.  If he is a drunkard, he is punished; if he is dishonest, he is drummed out of the regiment.

Wonderful is the magic of Drill!  Drill means discipline, training, education.  The first drill of every people is military.  It has been the first education of nations.  The duty of obedience is thus taught on a large scale,—­submission to authority; united action under a common head.  These soldiers,—­who are ready to march steadily against vollied fire, against belching cannon, up fortress heights, or to beat their heads against bristling bayonets, as they did at Badajos,—­were once tailors, shoemakers, mechanics, delvers, weavers, and ploughmen; with mouths gaping, shoulders stooping, feet straggling, arms and hands like great fins hanging by their sides; but now their gait is firm and martial, their figures are erect, and they march along, to the sound of music, with a tread that makes the earth shake.  Such is the wonderful power of drill.