Again, there is not a regiment returning from India but brings home with it a store of savings.  In the year 1860, after the Indian mutiny, more than twenty thousand pounds were remitted on account of invalided men sent back to England; besides which there were eight regiments which brought home balances to their credits in the regimental banks amounting to L40.499.[1] The highest was the Eighty-fourth, whose savings amounted to L9,718.  The Seventy-Eighth (Ross-shire Buffs), the heroes who followed Havelock in his march on Lucknow, saved L6,480; and the gallant Thirty-second, who held Lucknow under Inglis, saved L5,263.  The Eighty-sixth, the first battalion of the Tenth, and the Ninth Dragoons, all brought home an amount of savings indicative of providence and forethought, which reflected the highest honour upon them as men as well as soldiers.[2]

[Footnote 1:  The sum sent home by soldiers serving in India for the benefit of friends and relatives are not included in these amounts, the remittances being made direct by the paymasters of regiments, and not through the savings banks.]

[Footnote 2:  The amount of the Fund for Military Savings Banks on the 5th of January, 1876, was L338,350.]

And yet the private soldiers do not deposit all their savings in the military savings banks,—­especially when they can obtain access to an ordinary savings bank.  We are informed that many of the household troops stationed in London deposit their spare money in the savings banks rather than in the regimental banks; and when the question was on a recent occasion asked as to the cause, the answer given was, “I would not have my sergeant know that I was saving money.”  But in addition to this, the private soldier would rather that his comrades did not know that he was saving money; for the thriftless soldier, like the thriftless workman, when he has spent everything of his own, is very apt to set up a kind of right to borrow from the fund of his more thrifty comrade.

The same feeling of suspicion frequently prevents workmen depositing money in the ordinary savings bank.  They do not like it to be known to their employers that they are saving money, being under the impression that it might lead to attempts to lower their wages.  A working man in a town in Yorkshire, who had determined to make a deposit in the savings bank, of which his master was a director, went repeatedly to watch at the door of the bank before he could ascertain that his master was absent; and he only paid in his money, after several weeks’ waiting, when ne had assured himself of this fact.

The miners at Bilston, at least such of them as put money in the savings bank, were accustomed to deposit it in other names than their own.  Nor were they without reason.  For some of their employers were actually opposed to the institution of savings banks,—­fearing lest the workmen might apply their savings to their maintenance during a turn-out; not reflecting that they have the best guarantee of the steadiness of this class of men, in their deposits at the savings bank.  Mr. Baker, Inspector of Factories, has said that “the supreme folly of a strike is shown by the fact that there is seldom or never a rich workman at the head of it.”