152 THE FREEDMEN’S SAVINGS BANK
the Freedmen’s Bank compete with older and better established
 institutions of the kind in attracting and securing
a large amount of deposits, by holding out the inducement
of a larger percentage of interest than was warranted by
the earnings of the bank.
Of course any corporation, nation, or family which
spends more than it earns will in due time find its coffers
exhausted.
Second. Another cause of this deficit of $200,000 is found
in the fact that the former managers of the Freedmen’s
Savings and Trust Company undertook to do too much
work in another direction; impressed as they were with
the sense of the many benefits of savings institutions
among the freedmen of the South, they were tempted into
a sort of banking missionary movement.
Third. It cannot be doubted that a third cause has in a
large measure operated against the success of the Freedmen’s
 Bank, and this cause happens to be one which it is
most difficult to deal with,—because it is inherent in the
enterprise itself,—and one which no wisdom that the
managers of the bank can exercise can counteract or
remove.
This institution conspicuously and pre-eminently represents
 the idea of progress and elevation of a people who
are just now emerging from the ignorance, degradation,
and destitution entailed upon them by more than two
centuries of slavery. ‘A people who are hated not because
they have injured others but because others have injured
them. This feeling of caste, this race malignity, has naturally
 enough taken about the same offense at the Freedmen’s
 Bank as it did at the existence of the Freedmen’s
Bureau. It is as desirous to destroy the former as it was
to destroy the latter.
Fourth. Still another and greater source of evil has been
the senseless runs made from time to time upon the bank.
These have compelled the withdrawal of large sums of
money from very safe and profitable investments, and
diverted the regular business of the bank from making
money for its depositors to the work of obtaining the
means of meeting the demands of these disastrous panics.