Excerpt from People's Banks: A Record of Social and Ecomic Success One can scarcely help remarking upon the curious coincidence which opened to Europe at exactly the same period, about 1849, two essentially different roads to vast riches. It was while our first emigrants were rushing to the newly-discovered gold fields of California - big with promise, tempting to the eye with the alluring glitter of precious metal - that in a small village in the bleak Westerwald, and in a petty provincial town of that por tion of Saxony which Prussia annexed in 1815, the first spade was thrust into a 'gold field of a very different type, looking at the time bare and barren, but concealing under its unpromising crust a store Of wealth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.