Despite all the efforts bankers made during the last three decades of the nineteenth century to improve their collection of credit information and promote sound lending practices, earnings in the banking sector continued to fall. After a brief recovery during the late 1880s, the profit rate for national banks in New England resumed its downward trend, with the result that earnings for the period 1896–1900 were nearly 50 percent below their level for 1871–75 (see Table 4.1). Many people felt there were simply too many banks in the region and “that too many of them have too much capital and too large expense accounts for the amount of business they do.” But despite dwindling returns, there were no significant efforts to restructure the banking sector before the late 1890s. Indeed, as Table 6.1 indicates, the number of banks in the region continued to grow, from 505 in 1860 to 724 in 1895 (including both national and state institutions).