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PKOPOSITION FIFTH.

Officers remaining in the service twenty-five years should be allowed to retire on a pension equal to one-third their original pay, and for each additional five years of service, up to thirty-five, one-sixth more should be added, so as to enable it to reach, but never exceed, one-half their original pay.

Some greater inducement than the actual pay of their rank, or the promotion likely to befall them, should be presented to officers who remain in the service. Under the old regime it was rare to find an officer selecting the army as a career for life. A majority of the graduates of West Point have, generally, after a few years, resigned their commissions, and this, not so much from actual disrelish of military life, as from the enforced inactivity to which it doomed them. The monotony of garrison life -- the tardiness of promotion, and the dead uniformity of existence thus presented to the minds of ambitious young men, early led them to seek for spheres of more active employment. These they found in the varying pursuits of civil life, where, in scores of ways, they acquired fame and a competency.

This evil to the best interests of an army has been noticed in other countries as well as our own, and in order to control it to some extent, there have been created retiring pensions, founded upon length of service, and independent of all invalidism from either wounds or disease. This period, in general, has been extended to thirty years of actual service, but for reasons which will readily occur to all, and considering the difference in constitution also, we have suggested twenty-five years as long enough for officers serving in our armies. After that time, if the officer elects to remain, nothing prevents him, while a small prospective increase in his pension still acts as an incentive to his zeal and stimulates his hope; but having already served twenty-five years, and given his best days to the public, he has certainly earned his retiring pension, and should be allowed to return to civil life, where, with some remaining vigor, he may be able to engage in any pursuits that offer themselves to his tastes and inclination. In this way we should always have a corps of veteran officers, both seniors and subalterns, to command our armies, a feature that would insure both economy and good discipline in their government.

PROPOSITION SIXTH.

Loss of rank by judgment of a Court Martial should entail loss of its corresponding Pension, except where the party has already completed twenty-five years of service, when the judgment should only operate as a bar to any future increase of pension.

PROPOSITION SEVENTH.

Whenever an officer shall be suspended by judgment of Court Martial, from all command and pay appropriate to his rank, the time thus spent by him shall be deducted from the sum total of the period of service entitling him to a retiring pension.

It seems only a just result of the penalty thus incurred by an officer, that the time spent by him in disgrace should be blotted out of the record of his military career; and certainly this time, marking, as it does, a period of dishonor, ought not to be included in the honorable period by which he wins his way to a meritorious retirement and pension. Without making him begin his service de novo, it simply eliminates from the sum total a period when, according to the judgment of his peers, he was no longer deemed worthy to discharge his active official functions.

PROPOSITION EIGHTH.

Pensioners should cease to draw their pensions whenever they obtain a life office in the public service with pay equivalent to the pension.

Little argument is required to show the justice of this proposition. The rule that no man should draw two pensions from the same source, and for the same service, is very generally recognized as a just one. For, although it might be said that one was in fact a salary, yet the consideration moving to the appointment of a pensioner to a life office, when some one else could answer as well, would plainly reveal itself as a compensation to him for inadequacy of reward. Were the salary precisely equal to the pension, unless some perquisites were superadded, it is probable that most pensioners would not care to make the exchange; but when the salary transcends by far the original pension, it becomes in fact an amplified pension, and in that sense should extinguish the minor gratuity altogether. The difficulty might be to insure the office for life to the pensioner, but, and as we have shown in our previous report, whenever a pensioner accepts an appointment to a public office, which practically equals in emolument his original pension, that office should belong to him for life or during good behavior, and in return he should relinquish his pension.

PROPOSITION NINTH.

There should be a scale of physical disabilities included among the instructions issued to examining surgeons for pensions, by means of which they could definitely classify pensioners.