152 THE FREEDMEN’S SAVINGS BANK 
the Freedmen’s Bank compete with older and better es- 
tablished 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 Freed- 
men’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 repre- 
sents 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 nat- 
urally enough taken about the same offense at the Freed- 
men’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.