[174] The phrase "working classes," applied to the industrial population, seems as inaccurate as the phrase "lower orders," applied generally fifty years ago, is obnoxious. The distinction does not lie in this class being "working" while others are "idle" people. Something very different indeed is the fact. The tendency of late years has been that professional people should work harder, and "working" people less, and very few men who live by their profession work fewer hours than the handicraftsmen of our towns. Lord Stanley might have gone even further in his comments on the earnings of the industrial classes. Even putting aside the important consideration of how much the professional man spends of time and money in preparing himself to work at all, a great and ever increasing number of the wage-receiving class have now as good incomes as many hundreds of the less successful classes above them, while their expected or necessary expenditure is in almost all cases very much smaller. [175] News of this able nobleman's death has just reached us; but, though bearing in mind the spirit of the well-known maxim, we see no reason to alter our text. [176] See Appendix (F.) CHAPTER IX. ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POST OFFICE SAVINGS BANK SYSTEM. "Should the Post Office Savings Bank bill become law, and should it also answer, we shall then possess an institution the convenience and value of which it will be impossible to over-estimate, and this author will deserve the thanks of the country. The country will recognise at once the universal boon of a bank maintained at the public expense, secured by the public responsibility, with the whole empire for its capital, with a branch in every town, open at almost all hours, and, more than all, giving a fair amount of interest."--_Times_, March 20, 1861. "I have been asked," says Mr. Edwin Chadwick, "by several M.P.'s and others, what I thought of Post Office Savings Banks. I have answered them, that I know no measure of late years affecting the condition of the working and the lower middle classes which appeared to me so excellent in principle. I am disposed to say, as Sir Robert Peel said with reference to the Encumbered Estates Act, that it is 'so thoroughly good a measure, he wondered how ever it passed.'"