me, the first modern savings bank
in the United States was instituted in New York in 1816 after a plan
already developed in England.

In form these banks are mutual, having no capital stock on which
dividends are to be paid. The boards of trustees are self-perpetuating
and receive only fees for attending meetings. In their legal aspect
these banks have a philanthropic character. Their investments are
limited by law to specified, conservative classes of securities and
loans on real estate. The total increase from investments is,
after paying the expenses of operation and setting aside a surplus,
distributable to the depositors at regular periods. In the United
States the number of such institutions reported in 1914 was 2100.[7]
They have over 11,000,000 depositors, deposits to the amount of
$5,000,000,000, an average deposit of $444 per depositor, or of $50
per capita of the whole population. These figures are very unequally
distributed geographically, the divisions ranking as to total deposits
in the following order: the Eastern Middle, New England, Middle
Western, Pacific, Southern, and Western divisions. The first two of
these groups of states have about 75 per cent of all the deposits, the
Southern states hardly 2 per cent, and the Western (North Dakota to
Oklahoma) only 1/4 of 1 per cent.

Sec. 6. #Typical mutual savings banks#. About one third of these banks
are on the mutual plan, having no capital stock (most of them in the
East) and these contain about four fifths of all the deposits.
The stock savings banks have individual deposits of over a billion
dollars, and have outstanding capital stock to the amount of about
$90,000,000 (about 9 per cent of their deposits). These stock savings
banks to a much greater extent than do the mutual banks transact also
a commercial business.

The banks on the mutual plan are therefore the most important, the
typical savings banks. The average rate of interest they paid
to depositors in 1914 was 3.86 per cent. About one half of their
resources are invested in loans, mostly to small borrowers on the
security of real estate, and most of the remainder consists of bonds
and other securities of the safer kinds.

Savings banks are subject to the supervision and inspection of the
banking departments in the several states, a fact that exerts a
salutary effect though not insuring absolutely against either mistaken
judgment or dishonesty on the part of the bank officials.[8]

Savin