Library Collections: Document: Full Text

VARIOUS trains of argument have been used to justify the indiscriminate and lavish distribution of pensions in which the national government has lately been indulging. Every intelligent man who is not blinded by partisanship apprehends the true cause -- a determination to be rid of the Treasury surplus in any way productive of political results, and therefore under the guise of patriotic gratitude to secure the vote of the soldiers in the late war with it. But so adroit is the reasoning of those who seek political benefit therefrom that they not only deceive others but even themselves by sophistries which cannot too often be exposed. The present, the immediate future, and the times of posterity may be influenced by them and a bias given to other matters with even more disastrous results.

We are told that the state owes a debt to those who have endangered their lives in its service, and that the payment of pensions is an obligation like that incurred by contract. (1) Every one admits the obligation, but the ground of it is a sense of gratitude which establishes no right for those who have served and suffered. Viewed from any standpoint there is no department of the public service more glorious than that of the coast guard or life-saving patrol. Every station along the shore bids defiance to the elements. Restless and treacherous ocean, stormy winds, and blackest night combine against the seafarer. But the surf-boatmen sometimes baffle them all and bring safe to land tens upon tens and hundreds upon hundreds of human beings with precious lives. The personal risk of every member of every crew is extreme; exposure produces disease and brings on premature old age. The whole character of the work demands the utmost devotion, and not only subjects the men to intellectual and physical strain but jeopardizes their lives. And yet their pay is a pittance, the pay of the day laborer; neither individually nor corporately do they demand a money reward from the rescued and government grants only temporary pensions. He who saves lives has simply done his duty, and in private life would be regarded as a monster if he demanded all or any of the wealth of those whose lives had been spared through his agency.

On the other hand gratitude is expected from the rescued, and if he does not show it men mark him down as less than human. And gratitude is shown by some return, but not one commensurate with ability, for that would be compensation and destroy gratitude, which rests on a sense of obligation and honor. Hence even if the state were not the sovereign which it is, daily bestowing on the man benefits which he can only acknowledge but never requite, still the ground of its obligation to surviving soldiers and the families of those who died would be gratitude, and gratitude measured by the personal good will of its citizens.

And speaking of the sovereignty of the State we come to the legal aspect of this question of debt. The field is too large for extended discussion. It is believed that there is absolutely no precedent for the contention seriously made by so many advocates of the present pension system, that the claim of the soldier for support is a legal claim like any other presented for services rendered. The powers of the judiciary under which the individual seeks redress from the State are all granted by one of the parties concerned, to wit, the political sovereign, and limited to such pleas as deal with unfulfilled obligations laid upon the political corporation by its members. Local governments are responsible for the condition of roads and the proper lighting of streets, for sanitary conditions in certain instances, and can be sued for failure to perform their duty, the damages to be commensurate with the loss. But such governments were created for that purpose and lay taxes expressly to fulfil it. Was it ever conceived, however, that a house-holder should have the right to demand damages for the silver stolen by a burglar, the theft being possible by reason of inefficient police supervision? Could his family, if he were murdered in defense of his property, demand a pension of the state for their support? And the theory becomes the more absurd when it is urged that the soldiers who were once in arms saved the Union, that in so doing they preserved for us all that we have and all that we enjoy, and that therefore we are niggards when we refuse to share and share alike on the ground of a technicality in the laws which justice demands should be remedied by statute. The truth is that man as a social and political being incapable of either physical or spiritual welfare without the state has therefore a double character. On one hand his personality, his manhood, his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be his first concern. On the other hand all these come to him only in organized society; and in the necessary sacrifices, even to the risk of life, which he has to make for it under the safeguards of constitutional government he is merely performing an act of enlightened selfishness. Whatever obligation is incurred is one with the conditions of his existence in the personality which is everything to himself, which is in fact himself. In this way he is the state in a truer sense than that in which Louis XIV used the phrase.

Many classes of men go to war; but for our purposes they may be separated into two categories -- those who serve for gain whether as wages, booty, or political advancement, and those who serve for honor and patriotism. With the former we have nothing to do; they embark like every adventurer on an enterprise the success of which is all their own if it comes, and the risks of which they must therefore take. But the citizen-soldier who enlists from a sense of duty, jeopardizes his lawful calling, and with cheerful courage and self-denial ventures all for his country and his home does not he also receive pay? There may be two opinions as to this question. If the comparatively small sum which is given to the soldier either in the ranks or as an officer is an adequate return for his services in a difficult and dangerous occupation then there is an end of it, and there is no obligation on the part of the employer lasting for the lifetime of the employee. But many things combine to discredit this view. In the first place if we compare two men of equal parts and equal social standing, one fighting in the field, the other pursuing his occupation at home, the pay, equipment, and rations of the former are far less than the earnings of the latter, about sixty per cent, being a fair estimate. The soldier can sustain life and spare something for the support of those who are dependent upon him. And that is all; there is no question of growing rich by honest means in the military profession. On the other hand he pays no tax on his income and is not subject to forced contributions except in the uncertainty of pay day. It looks as if the burden of war were thus divided between the fighting citizen in the ranks and the tax-paying citizen at home. But in the second place the salaries of professional soldiers in the regular army are certainly calculated with reference to the life-long pension paid on retirement or disability. This pension is as much a part of the remuneration as the full pay during service, the total being spread over a lifetime to guard against imprudence, thriftlessness, or misfortune on the part of the recipient. If then the volunteer soldier, as is normally the case, receives the same pay as the regular or less without promise of pension, it follows that the idea of compensation does not enter into the offer of either bounty or monthly payment made on enlistment. Taking therefore either horn of the dilemma, that the citizen soldier either does or does not receive hire, he is neither legally nor morally right in demanding a pension for disability, much less for service. The state in emergencies has the power and the right to the assistance in some form of all its citizens, and by the enforcement of war contributions upon the capital of all and upon the labor of the non-combatants equalizes in a measure their burden with the service of those who fight.

It appears then that the citizen soldier has neither a moral nor a legal right to a pension. But, if so, why have most civilized nations been in the habit of granting pensions to disabled soldiers? The answer is one creditable to human nature. Gratitude, wisdom, and a sense of merciful compassion prompt us to a liberal pension system on the ground of disability. At the close of the civil war we were told, and properly so, of the nation's widows and orphans, of the nation's dependents, and the nation's wards. To all who take great risks, whether of life, property, or credit in the public service, we owe an endless debt of gratitude. Such a debt cannot be paid, and so the world has devised a system of military promotion or decoration, of societies and uniforms, which are a public proclamation of the nation's debt. Distinction and honor in some form are the rewards of merit, and human experience has stamped as both inexpedient and dangerous any attempt to transmute them into money.

Giving to honor grace, to danger pride,
Shine, martial Faith and courtesy's bright star
Through all the wreckful storms that cloud the brow of war!

But the general common-sense and right feeling of mankind realizes that for the disabled, for the widows and young children of the fallen, something more must be done. After the close of the war Americans showed themselves more grateful and lavish than any people had ever done. Every provision for the care and comfort of the sufferers was made in hospitals and soldiers' homes, and pension laws on a scale of liberality never before known were enacted. The sums granted were large and were steadily increased by successive acts; in one class of pensions from twenty-five to seventy-two dollars a month for the honorably discharged private. The restrictions as to those who were to receive the pension of the killed were so magnanimous as to give it to a widow, child, dependent mother or orphan sister, and three years after the war additions were made so as to increase the pension by a fixed sum ($2.00 monthly) for every child under sixteen. The whole system was right and most credit able to the nation. Under this plan the number of pensioners increased steadily as might have been expected for ten years after the war. There were 85,986 in 1865 and 238,411 in 1873. Under the same system the decrease in numbers as was natural then began, falling until the passage of the Arrears of Pensions Act in 1879, at the rate of about 2500 a year, the figures for 1878 being 223,998. Correspondingly the disbursements ran from $8,525,153 in 1865 up to $33,777,383 in 1871, decreasing to $26,844,415 in 1878. But since that date the number of pensioners has increased to 550,000 in 1890 and the appropriations for pensions to something over $100,000,000, without deficiencies.

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.

But mischief of this kind produced by the selfishness, greed, or thoughtlessness of a comparatively small minority could be checked if the majority were sound in its views and scrupulous in its conduct. Since 1879, however, there have been many symptoms of tendencies in the national mind which indicate neither lethargy nor happy-go-lucky good-nature, but point to a thorough reversal of old and tried opinions as to the essentials of American life. Some facts which justify such a fear are clear. See how tolerant we have been of inequality in taxation and the creation of privileged classes. Many illustrations might be given, but we confine ourselves to pensions.

During the last war there were enlisted into the Union armies 2,778,304 men, of whom 2,418,082 survived. There were 489,000 on the pension rolls at the beginning of last year, and about 1,100,000 are still living. The inception of this process of inflation in expenditure dates back to 1879, fourteen years after the war, when under the operation of a reasonable but humane pension system a diminution in the number of pensioners and in the expenditure for benefactions to disabled soldiers and their families had been constant for six years. The theory up to 1868 had been that five years of pension arrears was more than enough, in other words that within that period any disability contracted in service would show itself. But in 1879 all such limitations were discarded and Congress passed a bill, the notorious Arrears act, which became a law, granting to every successful claimant of the nation's bounty the amount of his monthly dole dating from his discharge from the service. This statute withdrew no less than $500,000,000 from the national treasury. The deed was the more flagrant because previous bills of the same nature had failed under the scathing denunciations of the great leaders in the war, and one of them had actually been vetoed by President Grant. He declared it to be "needlessly extravagant, uncalled for as offering the most dangerous inducements to fraud, as not demanded by the soldiers themselves, and as likely to benefit them less than the pension and claim agents who were the real authors of the measure." The act of 1879 was a victory not for the honest pension agent, but for the "pension shark."

Since that date there has been a steady succession of similar measures varying from the stealthy private bill to the most monstrous proposals for service pensions on a scale of extravagance hitherto unheard of. President Cleveland said in one of his vetoes: "Every relaxation of principle in the granting of pensions invites applications without merit and encourages those who for gain urge honest men to become dishonest." If to those weighty words he had added by saying: those who for gain or for partisan purposes urge honest men to become dishonest -- he would have exactly portrayed the next stage of development in the disastrous agitation. The great accumulations in the national treasury were a standing menace to honest government and a clear indication of a dangerous and unscientific system of taxation. They furnished therefore an irresistible argument against the conditions under which we were living. Hence some means must be contrived to distribute the surplus and empty the treasury. Adroit and unscrupulous managers were quick to take advantage of the fealty of one great party to the economic system now in vogue, and enlist its representatives in the plan of indiscriminate pensioning. They speciously represented that it was either that or the over-throw of protection. Other attacks on the surplus had been made and had failed. This was the last resort and it succeeded. Public opinion was swept from its old moorings and the second stage to the end was passed. We now have a law granting a pension to every man who served for ninety days, and was honorably discharged; if he suffer under a permanent disability not caused by his own vicious habits "which incapacitates him from the performance of manual labor in such a degree as to render him unable to earn a support." The nation maintains every soldier who cannot maintain himself, without regard to his services, to his sufferings for his country, or the reason of his disability. The hero covered with honorable wounds, the faithful and courageous soldier who served long and bore the brunt of battle, is now no better than the deserter, the straggler, the bounty-jumper, and the coward. Could the true military spirit of any people bear up and survive such a blow? Already within the year (2) more than 600,000 applications have been made under the measure; $30,000,000 have been added to the pension appropriation; if the demands are favorably considered next year $80,000,000 will be needed, and the grand total expenditure will be something like $200,000,000.

The next step, that to a service pension law, is easy. If more than two-fifths of the total cost of national administration is to be taken from the earnings of one set of men for the support of another, why not say three-fifths or even four, and swell the annual outlay of the Federal government to seven or eight hundred millions? Words like these have actually been used in the Senate of the United States. It is as easy to say one sum as another. They tell us this is not a cheap nation; and advise us "to be noble"! Yet we must face the facts and the direction in which they point. A most striking historical parallel could be drawn. Rome won her great and early wars, in contrast with Carthage and other nations, by the valor of her own citizens. But no reward was too great for the generosity of the nation to bestow on her victorious legions. Expectation and performance finally laid such a burden on her that mercenaries had to be employed for economy's sake, until at last the professional soldier realized his power and became the arbiter of her sinking destinies. Since then the tale has been more than twice told. Can we too, like the great and unsuccessful Austrian premier Prince Schwarzenberg, learn nothing from history? If we were really paying pensions instead of indulging in the dangerous trifling with the eighth commandment which is called in these days by various euphemisms we would abide in practice by the standard meaning of that word. Prussia under Frederick the Great distributed annually to disabled veterans less than one week's expenditure in the United States at present, and the total German pension appropriation today after three great wars fought within thirty years is about nine millions of our money. France gives somewhat more. Grant thought that $27,000,000 annually was not only an ample but a lavish provision for those who had suffered in the last war, barring all schemes of back-pay, service and dependent pensions which he denounced as highway robbery. Garfield in 1872 said that nothing but unwarrantable extravagance would increase the pension list above $29,000,000 a year. But we have changed all that, and the great surplus being annihilated at one stroke, by the next the utmost resources of this rich land will be taxed beyond endurance, unless we come to our senses and retrace our steps. (3)

There are extant a few copies of the first volume of a work by Freeman entitled: The History of Federal Government from the beginning of the Achaian League to the disruption of the United States of America in 1861. Mention of the title brings a smile to the faces of most of us, possibly a blush to that of the author; and yet if the date had been advanced about thirty years and for disruption had been substituted centralization -- the title would not have been so misleading after all. Philosophers tell us that the whole man is, in the phenomena of which he is the theater, the cause and the spectator. In this fact lies the difficulty of founding a scientific personal psychology. Much the same thing is true of national psychology, but while all analysis is distinction all distinction is not separation. If, therefore, we discover in ourselves many actions which point in one direction unmistakably, it will not do to reply that we mistake what is accidental for that which is essential. The almost unrebuked and unbroken trend of our legislation is towards centralization and state socialism.

We are no longer on the verge of socialism, we are in it, far advanced in both the principle and practice of what was but a very few years ago an abhorrent doctrine to all Americans. Nothing can explain our tolerance of the present and prospective pension expenditure but socialism of an extreme and dangerous type. It is not formulated as such a movement in the national mind, perhaps not even in the minds of most men who favor it. But no other explanation can be found for our legislative career than the insidious increase of state socialism as a force in the land. Protection, admirable within limits as a means of national growth and the conservation of balance between classes, has gone to lengths which were never contemplated by its early and philosophical advocates. What masquerades to-day under that name is simply the distribution to one class in the community of what belongs to another. The legitimate demands of a well-planned system of internal improvements have been exaggerated into River and Harbor Bills which grow as does nothing else but evil report. The practical politician, as he calls himself, knows that in their current shape they are merely the means of distributing a percentage of the national revenues among henchmen who do not necessarily waste the money, but do use the employment of laborers to influence votes. Nearly successful were the attempts made to parcel out what is the property of the whole country among the people of one section under the name of educational grants. But the climax is reached under a system approaching, not socialism but communism in the pension measures already operative and those which are seriously proposed as possible. Bishop Berkeley's panacea for Ireland was: "Let them be good." Any political system, however vicious, will work, in a way, where citizens have lofty principles and exercise self-restraint. But where thousands and millions of people with neither principle nor self-control are brought under a polity the corner-stone of which is manhood suffrage, the danger is clear. Demagogues struggle to buy votes at any price, trusting in their star, or Jesuitically justifying the means by the end; and more insidious still is the gradual dissemination of the feeling that where civil and political equality are universal, economic and social equality must follow as a corollary. Some curious psychological phenomena are revealed to the close observer of American life.

One of these is the substitution of legality for morality in the minds of vast numbers who lie outside the immediate limits of that educated and polite society within which we are sadly familiar with the idea, "Get wealth, my son, honestly if thou canst, but get wealth." But even the children of honest God-fearing immigrants hold the same view. They are educated in the common schools too often just far enough to have the pride of opinion and fear of the masses without the check-wheel of moral training. Soon comes the discovery that any religion which demands of its adherents a rigid outward observance of ritual is an object of ridicule among their schoolmates, and false pride destroys the hold of ancestral belief. Growing to manhood they lose along with their religious profession the morality which had its sanction in faith. So unconsciously they change the religious sanction for a legal one and pass into the unfortunate mental attitude of the servant who declared to a possible employer that she was neither a Roman Catholic nor a Protestant -- she was an American. Among large numbers of a higher social rank there is the same confusion, but in their case it is largely due to easy good-nature. Holland, the greatest of the late English writers on jurisprudence of a certain school, defines a legal right as that which a man can get without the use of force, i.e., by means of organized public opinion. The natural conclusion then is that whatever desirable thing can be had from whatever source is to be taken if only public opinion does not condemn. It is awkward if the taker land in jail, and in that case of course the means by which he laid hands on others' property are highly reprehensible. But if he escape the condemnation of the courts a large section of society, high or low, receives and secretly admires him. And if legislation, the law of the land, invites thousands to dishonesty why shall not the leaven of legality permeate the whole lump?

In reality it was by an appeal to such undeclared but powerful sentiments that our present socialistic condition was reached. Loud and noisy outcries were made to a forced, exaggerated, and unreal sentiment of gratitude in the case of pensions. National self-preservation was the plea in the matter of educational grants. The amelioration of the condition of the poor and general blessedness, without any experiences of suffering, are the professed ends of the Nationalists; and the single tax will not merely aid the poor, it will abolish poverty. All such arguments are made by men of the highest probity, but they are also the fleece in which the wolf disguises himself. So with the various responses to them. There are many ill-balanced enthusiasts who forget that if the ten commandments had never been promulgated amid the thunders of Sinai, both tables would still be valid to-day as the crystallization of human experience in society. But far more numerous are the thoughtless, would-be honest people who find human law a tangible standard and fail entirely to grasp either the nature or validity of ethical principles. An English chartist was told that if the wealth of all the Rothschilds were equally divided among all the men in England his share would be about seven shillings. "I ha' naught to do with it," said he, "I ha' six pun' in the bank myself."

Militant socialism finds unblushing and public support in two classes of organizations of differing degrees of respectability. One class acts under the mask of ostensible ends; the other manfully avows its purpose. The right of association is one of the most important in the history of free government, but there are so-called political societies which have neither political nor moral aims. They exist solely for the creation and distribution of spoils, that is, of taking by the machinery of the state large sums of money from the pockets of individuals which are not needed for good government and putting those sums into their own pockets. An even more scandalous procedure is perhaps the more common, that of taking for personal and private ends the money raised and needed for good government and leaving the duties of office unperformed. Scarcely a great city in America is without some such hall, ring, or machine, as it is variously called. Such socialism does not of course deserve so comparatively decent a name. It is adroit rascality taking advantage of the insufficiency of all human devices. Sometimes associations of the purest aims sink temporarily or permanently into similar practices.

When our armies were disbanded in 1865 the whole world looked on in delighted wonder as the men and officers returned to the duties of private life with the same ease and readiness with which they had taken up arms. There was no blustering, no lawlessness, no discontent. They were even better men in every walk in life than they had been before by reason of the severe discipline they had undergone. Gradually, however, as they watched with discontent the process of reconstruction, and misapprehended in some measure the temper of their gallant but defeated foes, their association became closer and their meetings more frequent. At last the Grand Army, theoretically organized for laudable purposes of sociability and the perpetuation of the most ennobling memories and sentiments, became more or less a political organization. It took new strength as a body with political aims, and for a time stood blameless even in the eyes of unsympathetic opponents. But in so doing it lost its moral force and hold on the nation as a disinterested band of war-worn veterans who had deserved well of their country. In its latest stage the question is asked whether it be even a legitimate political association. Its foes within its own household try to make it a machine with all the ear-marks of "bosses," "demands," and "workers." It has many honorable members who do not sympathize with its course, men who abhor dependent and service pensions as the devil's device to degrade the military profession into a huckstering trade. But so far the country has vainly waited for them to organize for the reform of their society from within or for a rupture and protest from without. The one great object of the war had been Union, to prevent present and future disintegration and avoid the disastrous example of Europe in the contiguity of States with discordant interests and therefore perpetual wars and enormous armaments, taxing every man, woman, and child for their unproductive support. But the brave defenders of this sound principle have helped in peace to bring about exactly what they fought to prevent by war, viz. unjust and unnecessary taxation. We spent for the war on the northern side thirty-five hundred millions between 1861-65, excluding the expenses of states, cities, and towns and the values destroyed by Confederate privateers. What the war cost the South can never be known. But since 1865 we have already disbursed in pensions one-third of the total expense of the national government for the war, and will probably on the present system spend as much more. If service pensions become the rule our outlay will far exceed the cost of our own war in its entirety, saddling us with a permanent annual expenditure sufficient to support the enormous armaments of France and Germany combined. At this moment the 62,000,000 people in the United States are annually paying $44,000,000 for a military establishment, $22,000,000 for a navy, and $160,000,000 for pensions including deficiencies -- a total of $226,000,000, which is 80 per cent, of what the combined 86,000,000 people of France and Germany together pay for their armaments. We bemoan their sad fate and the oppressive burdens under which the men, women and children of old Europe groan. But this is the pass to which we have come: 86,000,000 of French and Germans pay $265,000,000 for armaments and pensions -- 63,000,000 of Americans already pay $226,000,000. A simple sum in ratio. At our rate they would disburse $308,000,000, about $40,000,000 more than they actually do. And yet the appetite of some posts in the Grand Army whetted by the Disability Pension Bill is clamorous for more! This democratic land, neutral, industrial, and devoted to the arts of peace, is to be taxed for war reasons far beyond the dreams of the most ardent war-lord of Europe. Not long since you could scarcely open a newspaper without reading of the "demand" made by some post for a service pension.

It seems almost a waste of time and energy to say anything about avowed theoretical socialism in the face of such unavowed practical communism. But I have tried to find the most dispassionate and yet the frankest statement of its aims and the argument by which it tries to support them. It seems most tersely and candidly put by Bax in an essay first published in one of the leading English reviews and now reprinted in a volume to which it gives its title, "The Ethics of Socialism." The author claims, and he is in substantial harmony with the latest exponents of socialism, that according to its ethic every man should identify himself with humanity not in the way of self- sacrifice to other individuals as such but by the identification of the material conditions of individual well-being with those of social well-being. This being an economic age these conditions are economic. We ask ourselves in passing whether this is not on the whole a truthful generalization of the drift of the popular mind and the tendency of legislation. But hear the writer in his own words: "In what I may term a concrete ethic self-sacrifice can never be more than an accident. The substance of such ethic consists not in the humiliation of self before God but in the identification of self with humanity. By this we should observe is not especially to be understood the ' living for others ' of the current Christian ethics which at best means sacrificing oneself for other individuals as individuals. What we here mean is . . . . that affirmation of self with or identification of self in society which in the first instance can only be brought about by the identification of the material conditions of individual well-being with those of social well-being." Put in less philosophical terms this seems to mean that we are not, as the Christian ethic claims, to live for others but on others. Legal right, not duty, is the rule of conduct. The obligations of the moral law and the golden rule must yield to changed standards just as far and as fast as public opinion can be brought to tolerate them. The organization of the socialists is on the whole more dignified than that of the advocates of indiscriminate pensions because it is open and avowed, but as far as the latter have gone it looks as if their aims were identical. Even the German socialists, fiercest of their kind, now propose to abandon strikes and boycotts except in emergencies of the most extreme sort. They too propose to appeal to the majority. This is not caution or gentleness born of recent emancipation, as has been suggested, but shrewdness. They believe, wrongly we hope, that they no longer need force for their schemes, but that what is done every day under specious pretexts by others maybe done through peaceable agitation and openly by themselves.

There is one aspect of the whole matter to which allusion has incidentally been made which deserves somewhat further emphasis. The giving and taking of money where service has been rendered are honorable acts. They are honorable in a still higher degree where necessity is relieved by an able and generous patron; as when the feeble, aged, or incapable are cared for by the state. But they are dangerous in every respect to both parties where neither service is rendered nor real want exists. The legitimately pensioned soldier is a man worthy of all respect; but the individual who masquerades as a disabled soldier where military service had nothing to do with his weakness is an impostor or self-deceived. When a great class of such men are offered and accept grants from the treasury (that is from the pockets of their fellow-citizens) not only is their own manhood destroyed, which might be endured, but there rises at once a far more serious menace to the public welfare in that their example becomes contagious. There was an old debate among the encyclopaedists as to whether strong individuality be the representation of class or differentiation from class. The man who widely differs from all of his kind is eccentric; class type makes the strong personality. If this be true the pauperization of any class will produce representative paupers whose effrontery rests on the support of numbers. This is already happening, and the men with glib tongues and spurious arguments who support measures such as we are discussing grow more numerous and influential every day. We are threatened with the pauperization not of a few of the million unpensioned survivors of the late war but with the degradation of a body of citizens once the most heroic in the land. The old soldier, independent, self-respecting, and ubiquitous, should be a strong moral force in the community, an example and inspiration to us, to our children, and perhaps to our children's children. But, alas! the prospect is otherwise. Already the decline of his influence has begun. Veterans of the army wonder why they often fail to arouse enthusiasm where once they were received with rapture. In the ordinary community, city or country, their power, which should be enormous, is nothing at all, for they are too often immovable partisans and drones without energy. The reason is surely not because the flight of time has dulled our true gratitude or diminished the luster of glorious service. As yet there is not a respectable community where a man putting forth a fraudulent claim against his fellow-man, and supporting it by false evidence, could hold up his head. This is done, however, every day in the matter of pensions. Prosecutions have been tried, but, as a rule, they fail because the jury will not convict. Now juries are in an important sense the barometer of public morality, and we are forced to confess that the country as a whole tolerates the recipients of fraudulent pensions. The reason is in part cowardice born of political affiliations, in part a general feeling that any one who can get something from the government is a clever fellow and ought to enjoy it. But the general moral sense, though degraded, revenges itself in a diminished respect for the sharpers, and secondarily on the military survivors as a class.

There are crises when the truth must be told. This is one of them. Never was there more elusive duplicity in any movement than in the whole pension agitation since 1879. It is a time which calls for men fixed in principle and conduct, fearless to proclaim the truth when branded as pessimistic and un-American, words which are nearly worn out in the service of wire- pullers and job-masters. As Burke said of the repeal of the stamp act -- done "in the teeth of all the old mercenary Swiss of state, in despite of all the speculators and augurs of political events, in defiance of the whole embattled legion of veteran pensioners and practiced instruments of the court, we have powerful enemies but we have faithful and determined friends and a glorious cause. We have a great battle to fight, but we have the means of fighting."

What are these means? Above all, the great Irish leader said: "Agitate, agitate, agitate." The country is not rotten: "tidal" waves or, as the phrase now is, "land-slides," of sterling honesty and sound sense still occur at regular intervals on the sluggish surface of politics. And the first one to be set in motion must be that of economy. Let us be mean, stingy, if need be, in our federal taxation. After all, the chief functions of government throughout this Union are entrusted to the State members of it. In them taxation is direct and, being so, is promptly felt and carefully regulated. Last year the total of taxes levied by the States was about $70,000,000, a very reasonable sum for 62,000,000 people. Of course we may not hope under our system for direct federal taxes in the immediate future, but we may so far rouse ourselves as to demand that the sums raised indirectly shall but suffice, and barely suffice, for the expense of government. This is no place to unfold a plan, but there are able men who can and do explain feasible methods, and the necessity cannot be too strongly urged.

But agitation is not sufficient without organization. We want no new parties; constitutional government is not only hampered, it is endangered by the existence of minor political groups. But a well considered and easily understood appeal for a tax-payers' league to watch and expose the conduct of members of Congress who bind burdens of extravagance and folly on the public ought to be tried. There never was a time when free government owed more to a free press in the exposure of shams than now. Let everything be done to uphold the hands of journalists by displaying the public appreciation of fearlessness whenever shown. A group of right-minded men in every city, willing to unite and pay for the services of an active secretary to collect and disseminate abundant, ungarbled, and trustworthy evidence concerning the disability or service pension sham, would very soon correct the socialistic tendencies of pension expenditure, and shatter the false pretence of veneration which masks it. If to that were added the courage of conviction in the action of the same and similar men inside of party and out, our present well-grounded fears would shortly vanish.

And then it seems as if we must make a passionate appeal to the hitherto unheard sane majority in the Grand Army to save their comrades from themselves. So far there have been a few influential and manly protests, (4) but they have been inoperative. We can easily understand that those who make them shrink from unpopularity with comrades whose virtues all men admire. But blindness to fault and feebleness in action sometimes become criminal. Let us have, if necessary, reform from without. I can conceive of no more helpful institution to the country than a compact association of the soldiers who are self-respecting, modest, God-fearing citizens -- and there are tens of thousands of them -- pledged to redeem the good fame of our military service by opposition to both disability and service pensions, by demanding that the case of any deserving applicant shall be adjudicated by local officials, judges, or State officers, without regard to technicalities of evidence, and by securing, where disability not caused by service must be relieved, the necessary legislation in State legislatures to establish proper homes or retreats for the very exceptional cases of those soldiers who, through no vicious habits, but by misfortune or sickness have become unable to earn a living.

And yet we ought solemnly to consider that no public movement is possible, based on a principle of ethics either much higher or far lower than the average moral standard of the citizen. Such is the intricacy of society that not only is it difficult to trace chains of cause and effect, but even the single link is often inscrutable. The lack of high principle in individuals undoubtedly lies at the foundation of immoral public action, but on the other hand popular movements powerfully influence private judgment. Hence remedies for both evils are essential, and with every suggestion for the organization of agitations there must be an appeal to the pure standard of personal morality which John Bright hoped might be the measure of state action. Here, therefore, is the great opportunity of the church. For one, I believe in political preaching, not to advocate partisan measures but to bring to every listener the most difficult lesson that emotional, intellectual, and practical morality are one and the same thing. The counting house, the polling booth, and the church have not different morals nor different theories. The history of progress has been a history of the separation of organs. The early king was legislative, judiciary, and executive all in one. Now we have a hundred thousand men to carry on all the nice divisions and subdivisions into which each of these functions is cut up. So also with the occupations of men. A single pioneer builds a whole house, is architect, carpenter, mason, plasterer, and what-not. In high civilization each man of the forty trades calledinto requisition by house-building can do but one small thing, and his capacities in every other direction suffer atrophy. And so in the intricacy of our modern lives we are often scrupulously moral on one side, but find it, alas! most difficult to be moral all around; in our relations to the State as well as in our relations to persons like ourselves; in the fervor of religious emotion and in the reaction of commonplace trade or profession; in the quiet of well regulated private life and in the mad tumult of public business. Morality without the sanction of religion is, I believe, of doubtful possibility, but too often the charge is brought that what passes for religion is common enough without morality. If this reproach were taken home by the church, and the remedy found, the pension grab would find its place under the rubric of the moral law where it belongs. We would hear less said about law-abiding citizens like pensioners under a disability or service statute, and more about good men; less of legality and more of duty, less of economic socialism and more of personal exertion for ourselves and others.

Nothing which has been said above is intended to destroy the sentiment of gratitude for the soldier, or the moral obligation of any individual in this great nation, expressed in the immortal words of Lincoln's second inaugural.

With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

But the words are: "who shall have borne the battle." The honor of such is magnified in the receipt of the country's ungrudged gifts, the honest pensioner is the stimulus to patriotism of the generations which grow up about his knees. Reverence and love are his due, for his example calls for imitation; and the assurance of ease in his declining years is the guarantee of similar self-sacrifice when danger again appears. Heroism and patience mark the loftiest type of character. Let those whose welfare has been secured by his suffering praise him in the gate and shower their benefactions upon him as far as may be consistent with his manhood. The nation has nothing but the tenderest interest in such as these. It is for the sake of his honor, to preserve unfading his hard-earned laurels that we protest against the shame of legislation which in his name depletes our purse in the interest of pension brokers, and against the undiscriminating lavishness which draws no distinction between suffering heroes and those who should be content with the honor, which pales before no other, of having saved their country in the hour of her greatest need.

Wm. M. Sloane.