APPENDIX III 2S3

the writers of the day are to be expected in a people for whom
thrift and good husbandry hold forth no promise, whose future
contains no terror greater than the miseries of the present.
It should be noted, further, that the laborer was denied that
incentive to thrift and industry which might have been caused
by the prospect of interest earned upon his little savings. Landed
property passed out of his reach and no longer was frugality in-
vited by watching the small plot of ground grow in size and im-
provement. Nor did other forms of investment available to the
laborer exist to take the place of opportunities which the agrarian
revolution was destroying. Savings banks had not yet been organ-
ized, and the shares in the national debt, the only existing form
of readily transferable property, were quite out of reach of the
laborer's small surpluses. Should his earnings at any time have
proved to be in excess of his requirements, the hoard under the
hearthstone was the one form of saving available to receive the
surplus; but the hoard offered no interest or increase as a counter-
weight to the laborer's impatience for immediate gratification,
and, under these circumstances, it is scarcely remarkable that the
attraction of the alehouse and idleness should have proved more
powerful than the attraction of the hoard and industry.
