Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 1.djvu/789

 UNITED STATES V. CONNALIiT. 781 �lows language referring to the receipt by the agent or attor- ney of a certain compensation, and therefore indicates the receipt before the withholding of money, yet it is by indirec- tion only, or by implication, which seems to be true of the act of 1873 as -well as section 5485 of the Eevised Statutes. �The third section of the act of July 8, 1870, declared that thereafter no pension should be paid to any other person than the pensioner who was entitled to the same. This struck at the root of what was supposed to be an abuse under the pre- vious legislation of congress. This was a direction to every officer of the government whose duty it was to pay a pension. �This is claimed to bave an important bearing upon the thirteenth section of the act of 1864, by thus explicitly pro- hibiting the payment of money to any one but the pensioner himself; and, therefore, rendering apparently meaningless the latter clause of the thirteenth section of the act of 1864, in relation to the withholding of money. �In the case of the United States v. Irvine, 8 Otto, 450, the question was presented to the supreme court whether the act of 1870 repealed the thirteenth section of the act of 1864, and the court, referring to this point, says: "It is not easy to see, therefore, how an attomey is to get possession of the money, and how he can withhold it, or why there should be a law for punishing him for such withholding." "The argu- ment," the court says, "is not without force; but, without deciding that point, we prefer to answer another question, which wUl decide the present case." The question which was presented there was, therefore, whether the act of 18T0 neces- sarily repealed the act of 1864. The act of 1873 was not referred to, because the offence as charged was committed before the passage of that act. But here, with the act of 1870 in force, the act of the third of March, 1873, was passed, the thirty-first section of which declared that no agent or attomey, or other person instrumental in prosecuting any claim for pension or bounty land, should receive any other compensation for his services in prosecuting a claim than such as the commissioner of pensions should direct to be paid to him, not exceeding $25. And then the language ��� �