ouses and
investment companies, land banks, and stock exchanges.

_1. Saving and Savings Institutions_

Saving is an individual matter for which the essential conditions are
the development of the instinct to make provision against
uncertainties of future income and to better the material condition of
one's self and family, and a surplus of income above necessary daily
expenditures. In order to secure the realization of these conditions
to as great an extent as possible, many agencies cooperate in all
modern nations, among them savings institutions. Included among these
are various forms of provident associations, sometimes independently
organized and sometimes connected with other organizations, insurance
associations of many kinds, building and loan societies, and savings
banks.

The need for savings institutions varies greatly among the different
nations and among different classes of people in the same nation.
Among people of great wealth the surplus of income above expenditures
is so great that large savings can hardly be avoided, and among all
the well-to-do classes the margin from which savings are possible is
sufficiently large and the desire to save sufficiently great to insure
large accumulations of capital. Among these classes there is little or
no need for institutions designed primarily for the development of the
saving instinct. What they need are institutions for the safe keeping,
accumulation, and investment of the savings which they are constantly
making. The principal work of savings institutions, therefore,
pertains to the classes of people who are not well-to-do and who need
encouragement and help in their efforts to improve their material
condition, if they are so inclined, and stimulus to make such efforts,
if they are not so inclined.

The means available to savings institutions for the accomplishment of
these ends are the urging of the importance of saving upon the
attention of people who do not adequately appreciate it, the placing
at their easy disposal of facilities for making savings when they have
the ability and inclination to save, and the application of pressure
of various kinds to compel or induce saving.

In the application of these means the methods employed by the various
groups of institutions mentioned differ widely and they are efficient
in different degrees, partly because they have other objects in view
besides the promotion of saving and partly because they deal with
di