[7] We put the matter quite mildly here, though it is customarily and very properly spoken of much more severely. For example, Mr. Norris, one of the Government inspectors of schools, in speaking of the well-paid miners and iron workers of Staffordshire--who doubtless are little worse than the same classes throughout the country--says in one of his able reports: "Improvidence is too tame a word for it--it is recklessness; here young and old, married and single, are uniformly and almost avowedly self-indulgent spendthrifts. One sees this reckless character marring and vitiating the nobler traits of their nature. Their gallantry in the face of danger is akin to foolhardiness; their power of intense labour is seldom exerted except to compensate for time lost in idleness and revelry; their readiness to make "gatherings" for their sick and married comrades seems only to obviate the necessity of previous savings," &c. [8] Much of what we have said in the foregoing pages is admirably summed up in a sentence or two in an article on "Savings Banks," which we would not be far wrong in attributing to Dr. Wynter, and which we had not seen before these pages were written: "Contemporaneously with the growth of savings banks, we have seen a growth of civilization among the poorer classes. Thrift has not effected _all_ that amelioration of morals which contrasts so happily the mid years of the century with its younger ones; but it has been no mean confluent to the tide of progress, the softening of manners, the spread of education, the humanising of popular sports and pastimes, the wakening up of the natural dignity and self-reliance of the people,--the broad and indispensable basis of every other virtue."--_London Review._ [9] _Quarterly Review_, 1859. [10] Mr. W. R. Greg in the _Edinburgh Review_, 1853, p. 406. CHAPTER II. ON THE ORIGIN OF SAVINGS BANKS. "It would be difficult, we fear, to convince either the people or their rulers that the spread of Savings Banks is of far more importance, and far more likely to increase the happiness and even the greatness of the nation, than the most brilliant success of its arms, or the most stupendous improvements of its trade or its agriculture. And yet we are persuaded that it is so."--_Edinburgh Review_, 1818.