PENSIONS FOR ALL. 7 z$ 



There is a delightful contrast between the rugged and. healthy- 

 state of the old veteran after his pension has been allowed and 

 his decrepit condition before the allowance. I know a man who 

 was simply a harbor of refuge for diseases until he obtained his 

 pension, and then they disappeared. Having drawn his " arrears," 

 he prudently took out a life-insurance policy. The affidavit on 

 which he obtained his insurance curiously contradicted the affi- 

 davit on which he got his pension, proving that the pension had 

 restored him to health and made him a " good risk " for the insur- 

 ance company. The department was greatly shocked on learning 

 the facts, and revoked the pension ; but, on discovering that the 

 delinquent was a good caucus warrior and a hustler at the polls, 

 the department became shocked at its own imprudence and re- 

 stored him to the " nation's roll of honor." 



It is not irony or sarcasm to say that the insurance companies 

 can afford to give lower rates to old pensioners than to other peo- 

 ple, because the pensioners' chances of long life are greater than 

 the chances of other men. The commissioner's figures prove this. 

 He reports that the number of the pensioners of 1861 to 1865 who 

 died in 1888 was only two per cent of the three hundred thousand 

 pensioners on the rolls, most of whom must be between forty-five 

 and sixty-five years of age, and all of whom are legally and of- 

 ficially suffering from wounds and diseases contracted in the 

 army. Three hundred thousand healthy citizens of the like age 

 will show a larger mortality than those diseased pensioners can 

 show. This proves that a large proportion of those " veteran dis- 

 eases " are fictitious. 



Still more miraculous is the power of pension laws to bring 

 dead men back to life. Year after year the " Mexican War Pen- 

 sion Bill" was rejected by Congress. At last the claim agents 

 proved by the tables of mortality that the Mexican War soldiers 

 were nearly all dead. That war, they said, was an insignificant 

 affair ; our army in Mexico was small, and the surviving members 

 of it could not be numerous after the lapse of forty years. Be- 

 sides, it was invidious to be generous to the soldiers of the late 

 war and niggardly to the soldiers of Mexico. This plea carried 

 the bill through. It was passed on the 29th of January, 1887, and 

 before the 1st of March, 1889, 21,296 surviving soldiers of Mexico, 

 and 7,742 widows, had filed their claims for pensions under the 

 law. On the very face of the returns it is evident that most of 

 those claims are without any of that merit or grace whereby pen- 

 sions are justified, namely, service in battle, or at least on the 

 genuine theatre of war during the time of active hostilities. 



How happens it that so many Mexican War veterans spring up 

 out of the ground, like Roderick Dhu's freebooters, at the clarion 

 call " to pensions " ? Not one tenth of those claimants ever saw a 



