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THERE is little hesitancy about increasing the military pension list, and we are now sure at last to have a service pension in some form. The plan most in favor means that every man who served in the Civil War shall be paid $12 a month or some similar sum for the rest of his life, and that many pensions that are now less than $12 a month shall be increased. The principle of pensions so far paid is that they are paid for physical injury received in military service or for dependence because of physical injury. The service pension brings in the new principle of payment for service without regard to injury.

A service pension has followed every war preceding the Civil War -- the Revolutionary War, the War of 181 2, and the Mexican War; and the agitation for it to apply to the survivors of the Civil War has been persistent. For many years it was easily resisted, partly because almost any survivor could secure a pension under existing laws and practices, but partly also because a section of public opinion could still success fully oppose it.

But now the effective opposition seems to have been overcome. The President is said to favor it; the members of the pension committees favor it; the extravagant mood of the time favors it. Of course the Grand Army of the Republic favors it, and doubtless it is thought to be "good politics." Some men favor it, too, because they hope that it will simplify the whole pension-paying machinery. Not only does the Pension Office, with its system of politically appointed medical examiners, keep up its voluminous work, but the House of Representatives gives one day a week wholly to passing private pension bills, almost all of which are for the increase of pensions that cannot be secured by the regular machinery. The House gives every Friday to these pension bills. The total pension payments the last fiscal year were $139,000,000. A service pension for the survivors of the Civil War will add an unknown sum, estimated from $24,000,000 to $48,000,000 a year.

The pension system has thus added a new horror to war; for, generously as it was conceived, it has been so abused as to tempt men to a loss of self-respect and of character that has brought as serious a deterioration of citizenship as the demoralization caused by the bloodshed and the waste of actual war fare. We are now nearly forty years removed from the end of the Civil War. After this final debauch of a service pension the roll of pensioners will gradually decrease ; but it will be forty years more before the widows of veterans who married them for pensions will be rare enough to excite remark, and some of them will be on the roll a full century after the surrender at Appomattox. If they were reminders only of self-sacrificing patriotism which deserved the gratitude of the republic, they would be held in high esteem. But many of them will remind the great-grandchildren of veterans of the ease with which public generosity was perverted to personal degradation.

This wholesale bestowal of pensions will take away from them the distinction that they were meant to convey. They will be badges of honor even less than they are now. They will become mere bounties wrung from a rich treasury, having no significance but their pecuniary value. We have traveled a long way from the high and patriotic conception of a pension that was held forty years ago. We think of it only as an increase of income to a clamorous body, many of them mendicants, who profit by the nation's generosity and by the weakness of our political system.