closer attention to such subjects, was Mr. Thomas Attwood--"Currency Attwood," or "Little Shilling Attwood," as he was variously designated in some parts of the country. Whenever he could get an opportunity in Parliament to speak of Savings Banks, we have seen that he invariably clothed his ideas in a vocabulary of prejudiced invective. And he repeated himself outside the walls of the House whenever he had the chance. "Savings Banks," we find him saying on one occasion, "besides costing the nation so much, were a nuisance;" "Savings Banks were a sort of screw in the hands of the Government to fix down the working classes to the system." On these expressions, and others of a like tendency, as texts, those minor demagogues who went "on stump," preached for many a day. Considering how such men treated the institution of Savings Banks, it is wonderful that they progressed as they did. That they kept many from using these institutions is beyond a doubt. Such men had a surprising power over the labouring classes, and though that power was often used for good, too often it only excited distrust and apprehension when distrust and fear were least needed and most dangerous. The true friends of the poor--and there have been many such at all times--said, in effect, "We have reason to believe that much money now spent unnecessarily might be saved for seasons of want and old age, if the poor had the means offered them of putting that money by easily, safely, and profitably. We have exerted ourselves to get such places established, we give our best exertions to have them conducted properly, and we advise all who have money to spare to intrust it to this safe keeping." Cobbett, on the other hand, put his printers to work to say "What a bubble! At a time when it is notorious that one half of the whole nation are in a state little short of actual starvation--when it is notorious that hundreds of thousands of families do not know when they rise where they are to find a meal during the day--when of the far greater part of the whole people much more than half of them are paupers; at such a time, to bring forth a project for collecting the savings (!) of journeymen and labourers _in order to be lent to Government_, and to form a fund for the support of the lenders in sickness and old age!"[45] It would be idle to show the fallacy of such reasoning, even admitting the facts of the case to be as they are here stated. Suffice it to say, that in this way did such men pander to the prejudices of the uneducated. Many thousands of industrious workmen who had had no training, and who could not discriminate between real and imaginary evils, were thus too often flattered into believing that they had more than their share of the truth, honesty, and manliness of the age on their side, and that the upper classes were against them on every side and in all respects. All this is pretty well over now.[46] Just as the sun expels the mists