ABSTRACT
Supposing a peasant living in a very simple society where there is very little buying or selling, desires to save. One way in which he could do so would be to grow more foodstuffs, etc., than he needed in a normal year, so that he would have extra stores in his barn for use in years of bad harvest. In most parts of the world he would sell some produce and he might bury the money received in the ground or hide it in a chimney. This latter kind of saving, which is known as hoarding, still takes place among ignorant people in modern England, but it forms a very small part of the total savings. It is analogous to the storing of food by the peasant, a saving against bad times, for whenever adopted it pre-supposes that the money, if necessary, will be able to purchase the required goods at some future time. Most people, however, in modern England, even when saving against a rainy day, put their money in a bank or otherwise invest it.
