he 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.

To gentlemen accustomed to receive a regular income, a small lump sum like
ten or twenty pounds appears a totally inadequate provision against old
age. They institute elaborate calculations by professed accountants, to
discover whether by any mode of investment a small subscription
proportionate to the labourer's wages can be made to provide him with an
annuity. The result is scarcely satisfactory. But, in fact, though an
annuity would be, of course, preferable, even so small a sum as ten or
twenty pounds is of the very highest value to an aged agricultural
labourer, especially when he has a cottage, if not his own property, yet
in which he has a right to reside. The neighbouring farmers, who have
known him from their own boyhood, are always ready to give him light jobs
whenever practicable. So that in tolerable weather he still earns
something. His own children do a little for him. In the dead of the winter
come a few weeks when he can do nothing, and feels the lack of small
comforts. It is just then that a couple of sovereigns out of a hoard of
twenty pounds will tide him over the interval.

It is