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This growth in pension expenditure has been brought about by several causes, some of which are in themselves not connected with wrong tendencies in the nation as a whole, but inhere in the insufficiency of all human devices. One of these is the practical impossibility of determining on legal evidence such as the Pension office demands the fact of disability -- so that many worthy cases were without remedy under the old statutes. Another is the tendency of men under the prevailing evolutionary philosophy to trace the causes of disease to remote periods, and surviving soldiers who are now growing old and suffering from the ordinary physical ills which herald approaching incapacity for labor trace their origin with unerring certainty twenty-five years back to the hardships and exposure of camp and field. Still a third is a sentiment, one of the purest in the human mind and ordinarily very rare in American life -- that of veneration. But uncommon as it is, and splendid as it is in the right place, the adversary is using it for bad ends.

Special cases call for special remedies, and in our earlier history the feeling had sometimes good, sometimes bad practical results. So arduous and meritorious were the services of the officers in the Revolution regarded, that the country bestowed upon them in 1785 a service pension. But many of them had no other return for private means expended in the public service, and the measure was not abused. In 1818, however, when, as Madison said, "Most of the survivors of the Revolutionary struggle had paid the debt of nature, but some still living and not provided for by existing laws were reduced to indigence and real distress," Congress passed a bill to pension every soldier who had served nine months or more, and "was in need of assistance from his country for support." The expectation of Mr. Bloomfield, the promoter of the bill, was that there would be something over 700 pensioners under it, and that the annual expenditure would be about $40,000. The fact was that public morality was so debauched by the prospect of getting something for nothing that the appropriation required in the first year was a little less than two and in the second nearly three millions. Congress was therefore driven to pass stringent measures in 1820 to diminish fraud and punish offenders; but in 1822 there remained 12,331 pensioners under that bill, and there are still a number on the rolls. In 1832 we granted service pensions to some of the soldiers and sailors of the war of 1812 and in 1871 to such as were sixty-two years of age. We have at present 9000 pensioners of that war on our rolls. In 1878 we followed the same policy with reference to the survivors of the Mexican and Indian wars. In all such cases we acted from a sense of veneration. We waited long, set a limit at the age beyond which men work with difficulty, and the total number under all such bills is about 117,000. Nevertheless the claim is made and reiterated, that the precedent for dependent and service pensions was set by the fathers, the wise men of old. If the pension office would relax its stringent rules as to evidence, and the cases of soldiers not disabled while in service, but afterward incapacitated by disease for labor, should be handed over to the local authorities, where they belong under our federal system, the moral force of such arguments would be spent as far as the government at Washington is concerned. But there is no remedy for the folly which, dazzled by the logic of extremes, would apply the veneration argument for dependent and service pensions to the veterans of the civil war, except imminent national bankruptcy.

Even under the normal disability statutes many men of means draw substantial sums of money year by year. Every one of us has personal knowledge of individuals well-to-do in various walks of life, day-laborers, tradesmen, professional men, who think it not only no harm but thoroughly just to increase their income and their comfort by drawing from other taxpayers what they do not really need. The community at large sustains them in their course of conduct, which is either taking advantage of a technicality, their disability coming under the language of the statute not precluding self-support, or else accepting money as compensation for services rendered. It is to be hoped for the sake of American honesty that the latter is the conscience-salve applied by such persons. But a lofty principle of independence and patriotism should forbid it, and the State should refuse it to those who have not a nice sense of honor. If notions of that kind were to pervade a whole community it would be an end of strength in the government should other wars arise. No land dare deliberately enter upon the uncertainty of war knowing that the surviving soldiery would expect and demand so lavish a reward in the event of success and that public opinion would uphold their mercenary spirit. If the tender compassion shown by right feeling to the few is to degrade the many, destroying their self-respect and extinguishing the heroism of peace, then our nation is verging to its decline and American virtue is to go down before petty temptations.