Mr. T. H. Hinchman, a prominent banker of Detroit, says: “The change from the purpose and policy of original savings institutions has been progressive, but of questionable character. It was not the acquirement of experience or the result of greater wisdom, but of enterprise by those in pursuit of greater profit. Different aims and objects should be under distinct, separate, and appropriate laws. Benevolent institutions require different men and other management than those conducted on a commercial basis for profit.” He argues that there should be separate enactments for savings institutions and for trust companies, and indeed a wise distinction is made by the laws of most of the older States. These undoubtedly prove advantageous to all banks and bankers, as they simplify and increase their business. Officers of banks doing a mixed business are thereby relieved from error, responsibilities, risks, and cares, and savings depositors escape commercial hazard, and are free from risks caused by mismanagement of persons who advertise as savings banks. Those who remember the frightful confusion that prevailed before the establishment of the National Banking system, when the notes of the old State banks constituted a considerable portion of the circulating medium, are among the most ardent admirers of the present system, at least so far as its method for the issue and guarantee of notes is concerned. In those days the laborer often went to his home on Saturday night carrying the wages of his week’s labor in the shape of notes issued by banks in half a dozen different States, and when his thrifty wife went out to expend them in purchase of the necessaries of life for her family she would be distressed to find that for some she could get but ninety cents on the dollar, for others eighty cents, and that still others were of too questionable a character to be accepted by the shopkeepers at all. The farmer often received for the fruits of his toil notes of which he could know nothing, and which would be subsequently declared by experts to be worthless because the bank which had issued them was in liquidation, and it was not at all uncommon to find a forged note or two among them, for in the myriad issues of bills of every conceivable design and character of engraving the forger had an easy task. The present National Banking system probably never could have been called into existence except for the difficulties in which the government was involved by the war with the South, for a scheme overthrowing, as it did, so many other systems organized by the authority of States would have met with an irresistible storm of opposition. As it was, the act authorizing it was fought not only by the opponents of the administration then in power, but by men like Roscoe Conkling, of New York, and Senator Collamer, of Vermont. Mr. Logan C. Murray, President of the United States National Bank of New York city, thus speaks of the National Banking system: