Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/518

492 in most cases been accidental as under the present system they necessarily must be. The present system does not give the Pension Office the means to detect fraud unless it betrays itself, which it sometimes does. And for this reason the number of detections has been comparatively small, while the number of fraudulent cases is undoubtedly much larger and will no doubt increase after the passage of the arrears bill which has already proved a tremendous stimulus. The very fact that now, fourteen years after the close of the war, an average of 5760 original invalid claims and 1433 original widows claims come in every month, while the average per month for the twelve months preceding the passage of the arrears act was only 1478 and 519, respectively, would seem to indicate that a great many persons are now trying their chance of obtaining a pension who never thought of it before and that it is high time to look for some system facilitating the detection of fraud. The Pension Office is indeed the distributor of the charities of the Government, but it is, in my opinion, an important part of its duty to see to it that the charitable fund be not robbed by persons who have no just claim upon it.

The paper of your correspondent makes upon me the impression that, in some things at least, he strives more to appear right than to be just. I do not think it quite just, for instance, that after, by implication, publicly charging the Commissioner of Pensions with something like favoritism in the payment of arrears, he should deem it sufficient to withdraw that charge in private. Neither would he, in criticising the practice of withholding record information from the claimant to test the truth of his evidence, have stated, as a great hardship, that “a man who has nearly completed his case and then lost the number of it, should be unable to obtain that number from the Office,”—had he taken the trouble to inform