62 
POSTAL SAVINGS 
letters and in transmitting money to their fami 
lies or others in the homeland the foreign born are 
frequently brought to the post office. The un 
skilled laborers among the foreign born would 
rarely be brought to an American savings bank 
or commercial bank by anything but the desire 
to deposit or withdraw money. Foreigners be 
come familiar with the post office and not with 
the bank. (3) Adi of the first five countries in 
the list have postal savings banks, and immi 
grants from those countries have been familiar 
with such banks at home. (4) The European 
war through its interference with “immigrant 
banks,” and with the sale of international money 
orders (an explanation of which is given by the 
Postmaster-General in his annual report for 
1915, pp. 27-28), has encouraged the foreign 
born to keep their savings in the United States. 
Of course the small per capita deposit of na 
tive born Americans does not signify any lack of 
thrift on their part. It means rather that the two 
per cent interest paid by the postal savings bank 
is too small to appeal to the native born, and that 
for this and other obvious reasons of less impor 
tance they place their savings elsewhere. 
Inasmuch as the avowed object of the estab 
lishment of postal savings banks in the United 
States was the encouragement of thrift, it is nat-