The sources from which the materials of this account have been drawn, are the laws, regulations and instructions of which the translation is appended, the statistics of the cheque and clearing service in the last official report (Zwölfter Rechenschaftsbericht des postsparcassen Amtes) the remarkable studies of M. Tobisch, secretary of the Savings Bank, and finally direct observation. Guided by one of the most enlightened officials of the Savings Bank, Inspector L. Kotschy, I have been able to penetrate into the inner life of this admirable institution. The Vienna Central Postal Bank occupies the old palace of the University; there, distributed in its antique halls, a population of 1,300 employés, among them 150 ladies, working after a skilfully organised plan, pursue silently now for thirteen years, with inflexible method, an experiment of very great interest for science and for the economic life of societies. Bound by invisible threads to more than four thousand secondary organs:--the post offices, which plunge directly into the torrent of the exchanges,--the Central Office records each day with extraordinary precision the minutest changes that the ever increasing number of its adherents accomplish in the social movement of wealth. All the operations of which it thus fixes the traces arrange themselves into two great classes which recur as the two essential aspects of the rhythmic movement of a central organ of circulation; one joins in the formation of the property of every adherent of the system, in the constitution of his credit at the Central Bank; the other leads to different modes of disposing of his property and to the formation of his debit. The services of cheques and account-clearing[H] of the Austrian Savings Bank enable on the one hand every person to make, under conditions fixed by law, in any Post Office in the Austrian Empire, payments on account, or to the profit of all those who participate in the service; on the other and they enable every adherent to assign by means of a payment cheque, a part of his property to anyone, physically and morally, or by means of a clearance cheque to cause the transfer to be made to the account of another participator in the service. The Austrian terminology bristles with difficulties, the name of _cheque verkehr_ is here given to the first of these services, _circulation of payment cheques_ resulting in the end in the use of metallic money, and to the second service, the name of _clearing verkehr_, circulation of _clearing cheques_, which resolves itself, as far as the Savings Bank is concerned, into the transference from one account to another, in the substitution of one creditor for another. The cheque service may exclusively be adhered to, or the cheque and _clearing_ service.