Passage
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, several governments allowed their post offices to accept small deposits, paying a modest fixed rate and guaranteeing the balance. Offices already stood in villages no bank would enter, the clerks were already bonded, and the minimum was set low enough that a labourer could open an account with a day's wage. A balance could be withdrawn on a week's notice at any office in the country. Balances grew quickly. Contemporaries read the rising totals as evidence that the scheme had created thrift among people who had never been able to save, and the reading has been handed down by historians who inherited the figures along with it.
What the ledgers record, though, is deposits, not saving. A rural household with a surplus had always had somewhere to put it: grain held back from sale, an animal bought in a good year and sold in a bad, cloth, a loan to a cousin, a subscription to a rotating fund among neighbours. None of these left a national series behind. If the post office drew balances out of those channels rather than out of consumption, recorded saving would climb while household saving stood still.
The two possibilities can sometimes be separated. In districts where the registers of village lending societies survive alongside the postal ledgers, the two series move against each other through the first decade after the offices opened, deposits rising as the societies' books thinned. In districts that had no such society, postal balances rose from nothing with no offsetting decline that anyone has found, and there the new institution plausibly added something.
So the question of whether the post office raised saving has no answer at the national level: the institution was doing two different things in two kinds of place, and the aggregate adds them together. The series historians have found most useful is the one least able to tell those places apart. It is complete, annual and consistent, and it counts the one quantity the argument does not turn on.
