When well-paid workmen such as these are able to accumulate a sufficient store of savings, they ought gradually to give up hard work, and remove from the field of competition as old age comes upon them.  They ought also to give place to younger men; and prevent themselves being beaten down into the lower-paid ranks of labour.  After sixty a man’s physical powers fail him; and by that time he ought to have made provision for his independent maintenance.  Nor are the instances by any means uncommon, of workmen laying by money with this object, and thereby proving what the whole class might, to a greater or less extent, accomplish in the same direction.

The extent to which Penny Banks have been used by the very poorest classes, wherever started, affords a striking illustration how much may be done by merely providing increased opportunities for the practice of thrift.  The first Penny Bank was started in Greenock, about thirty years since, as an auxiliary to the savings bank.  The object of the projector (Mr. J.M.  Scott) was to enable poor persons, whose savings amounted to less than a shilling (the savings bank minimum) to deposit them in a safe place.  In one year about five thousand depositors placed L1,580 with the Greenock institution.  The estimable Mr. Queckett, a curate in the east end of London, next opened a Penny Bank, and the results were very remarkable.  In one year as many as 14,513 deposits were made in the bank.  The number of depositors was limited to 2,000; and the demand for admission was so great that there were usually many waiting until vacancies occurred.

“Some save for their rent,” said Mr. Queckett, “others for clothes and apprenticing their children; and various are the little objects to which the savings are to be applied.  Every repayment passes through my own hands, which gives an opportunity of hearing of sickness, or sorrow, or any other cause which compels the withdrawal of the little fund.  It is, besides, a feeder to the larger savings banks, to which many are turned over when the weekly payments tendered exceed the usual sum.  Many of those who could at first scarcely advance beyond a penny a week, can now deposit a silver coin of some kind.”

Never was the moral influence of the parish clergyman more wisely employed than in this case.  Not many of those whom Mr. Queckett thus laboured to serve were amongst the church-going class; but by helping them to be frugal, and improving their physical condition, he was enabled gradually to elevate their social tastes, and to awaken in them a religious life to which the greater number of them had before been strangers.