Boston agency for this charitable use by a rich "Quaker Aid Society" of Virginia. Mrs. Howe refused to tell how the funds thus derived were invested, because, as she craftily said, "she was afraid of the displeasure of her superior officers." Yet, thoroughly baseless as was the project which could give no open account of itself, and utterly absurd as were its promises, it nevertheless had a rushing success. Each new depositor had to be introduced by a previous depositor. There was a great show of strictness in inquiring into their fitness. The first depositors, when they had got their enormous interest, reported it to their friends, and the craze spread rapidly among the Boston women to avail themselves of the speculation. That they were the recipients of a charity made no difference. The bank would have nothing to do with men, and constantly encouraged the idea that women were abundantly capable of transacting their own business without masculine advice. And so money poured in by the thousands. The big interest was paid out of the influx, and if a depositor wanted her money back she could have it any day but Sunday, and with it she got the curt notice that she need not apply again. The result was that the "miserable old rogue," with her "swindling savings-bank," in the course of a few months drew from the pockets of ten or twelve hundred New England women no less than half a million dollars. The "Boston Advertiser" at length attacked the concern vigorously, and it collapsed in three weeks. A few of the earlier depositors received their large interest, and got out also with their principal; but when the scheme was pushed into insolvency there remained only five per cent, of their investments for some eight hundred depositors.
As was natural, the women who had walked into this trap and lost their money were roundly denounced for their credulity and business incapacity. Miss Dodge resents this charge in her usual spirited way, launches profuse invectives upon the men who broke up the fraud, and, while not excusing Mrs. Howe, defends her sex from the assaults of masculine "insolence, ignorance, and stupidity." She proposes to show that "the history of the Ladies' Deposit does not demonstrate the credulity of women, the immorality of women, or the educational or political incapacity of women." If not successful in proving these positions, she, at any rate, shuts the mouth of her masculine critics by showing that men too are abundantly imposed upon and cheated, and are therefore credulous and stupid as well as the women.
The subject is here widened, and our chief interest in the affair relates to this aspect of it. What are the conditions that made this transaction possible? What are the causes that led to it and which lead to other kindred results? The particular event has passed away, and in itself is of but little moment; but what sort of a tree is that which bears such fruit? The state of mind that produced it still continues, and we may expect the same things to be done again and again, with only a change of names, forms, and tactics. That which has just now had a conspicuous feminine expression is by no means wholly an affair of sex, but is a common phenomenon. The Ladies' Deposit was in fact but a drop in the bucket compared with the omnipresent impostures and cheats of all grades and qualities which are transacted everywhere. What is the condition of mind which leads to them?
We state nothing new in saying that such impostures as Howe's bank prove a widespread deficiency in mental cultivation. It has been urged that there is a gross want of instruction in our schools in the elementary principles of economics, a knowledge of which would serve as a protection in emergencies of
