Reverting to the consideration of the actual Post Office Bank rate, it is perhaps unlikely that the small tradesmen class--except where such persons lodge their money at the Post Office merely for security--feels satisfied with it. Happily, however, this is a class which does not need to be considered, and which scarcely will be considered. The Government offers no factitious allurements or inducements to any class of the population; and if it did, would be certain to confine the inducements to those portions of the poorer classes who stand most in need of encouragement. And as for the rest, the Post Office Banks do not in any way interfere, as Mr. Gladstone has recently said, "with the labouring man's liberty of choice, or the liberty of choice enjoyed by anybody else; if he thinks he can do better with his money than by carrying it to the Government Savings Bank, by all means let him do better with it." A low rate of interest is given for the principal deposited; but then that principal is guarded with uncommon security, and can be moved, added to, or withdrawn from, with the greatest possible convenience. And these terms, theoretically and practically, suit the industrious classes, whoever else they do not suit. Practically they meet the wants and satisfy the demands of a large section of depositors, or the banks would not have shown such an extraordinary amount of success. Nor are we in want of authorities who assumed, theoretically, that this would be so. "If Government give security," said a shrewd witness before the Savings Bank Committee of 1858, "they should pay less interest, on the principle that Chubb's locks cost more than the ordinary ones." Dr. Chalmers took great interest, as our readers must already know, in Savings Banks. His argument was, that the ready receipt and payment of small sums together with safe custody was everything, and the rate of interest quite unimportant; he more than once said, that "the result of high interest had been to swamp our Savings Banks as a national system." This question of interest was largely discussed in Mr. Slaney's Committee of 1850. In that Committee Mr. John Stuart Mill was asked whether perfect security or a high rate of profit was most sought after by the industrious classes; to which he replied: "In the case of the working classes no doubt security is the main object, and it is so in the case of all whose savings are small." In the same Committee, Mr. J. M. Ludlow, an eminent barrister, gave it as his opinion that "the poorer a man is, the more important to him is the safety of his investment, independently of the question of profits;" and in answer to a similar question addressed to him, the secretary of a working man's building society said, that "the certainty of security is the most powerful inducement to investments among the working population."