PLJNSIOWS FOB ALL. 727 



will stoop to mendicancy for a pension they do not need. Pope 



asks : 



"What can ennoble sots or slaves or cowards? 



Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards." 



And yet a pension can im-noble the chief of all the Howards, and 

 reduce him to ignominious pauperism. The Duke of Norfolk, 

 with an income of two millions of dollars a year, is on the pension- 

 list of England for sixty pounds a year. This pension was granted 

 to his ancestor by the gentle Richard III. Nobody knows why. 

 It may have been for smothering the princes in the Tower. It 

 could not have been for anything very good, because Richard 

 was not in the habit of rewarding virtue ; yet for more than four 

 hundred years the Dukes of Norfolk, chiefs of all the Howards, 

 have asked for and received this degrading outdoor relief. We, 

 too, can fall to the same base level by the same process of gravita- 

 tion, as the following testimony shows : 



When the Mexican War Pensions Bill passed, the " honor " of 

 being the first man to claim his dole and get it was given to a 

 prominent and wealthy citizen of Kentucky, who did not need the 

 alms any more than the Duke of Norfolk needed the charity of 

 sixty pounds a year. Yet he took it, and was applauded for his 

 promptness by the press as if he had done a patriotic deed. Such 

 demoralizing power has a pension. 



It is true that we have no hereditary pensions yet extending 

 beyond the third and fourth generation, but we have made a fair 

 beginning, and may hope to enjoy that high-caste luxury in gor- 

 geous blossom after it shall be withered and dead in England. 

 The " royal prerogative " is now exercised by Congress, with a 

 profuse liberality exceeding that of kings. Our senators and rep- 

 resentatives are creating a pensioned aristocracy out of the con- 

 sanguineous relics of naval and military officers, official digni- 

 taries, and successful politicians, many of whom had no claim to 

 recognition except that their public lives were laboriously spent 

 in the private service of themselves. 



The " retired system " is a high-toned pension scheme, avail- 

 able only to those who have taken the superior degrees in the 

 order. This is borrowed from the " half-pay " and " retiring " sys- 

 tem of England, where it had a logical and consistent reason for 

 existence, under the social law which decreed that no man should 

 earn an honest living by his own exertions after he had once held 

 the " king's commission." No such law prevails in this country, 

 and the practice founded on it is an exotic ill adapted to the cli- 

 mate of a republic. We have now on the " retired list " of the 

 army one general, four major-generals, twenty-six brigadier-gen- 

 erals, eighty-five colonels, and three hundred and fifty-nine officers 

 of lower grade. The navy can make a like showing, and the civil 



