Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/251

Rh the war notably strong and able-bodied; men who draw increased pensions for increased disabilities, while they are no more disabled than before; men who draw the maximum pension for total disability preventing them from “earning a support at manual labor,” but who are earning a living by manual labor as well as they ever did before; men who have for years been drunken loafers indulging in all sorts of excesses, but are drawing pensions under a law which provides that no disability which is the result of his own vicious habits shall entitle a man to a pension; men who are rich, and should be ashamed to help in draining the Treasury; women drawing widows' pensions long after having forfeited their right to them; and so on. And the proportion of such cases to the total number of pensioners in those localities is more than sufficient fully to justify the saying that the pension roll is “honeycombed with fraud.”

The long series of reports and articles published by the Times has thus completely shut the mouths of those who asked for further proof of what to any fairminded man is already conclusively proven by the eloquent figures of our pension statistics. It may reasonably be assumed that ten years after the close of the war nearly all those really disabled by wounds or disease in the service had applied for pensions and had been provided for. The war closed in the spring of 1865. In 1876 the number of pensioners on the rolls was 232,137, and the amount paid to them $28,351,599.69. It might justly be assumed that in the ordinary course of things the number of pensioners and of soldiers widows and of dependent soldiers' parents would decrease by death, that the pensioned orphan children of soldiers would come of age and that therefore the amount to be paid out in pensions would steadily grow less. So it has been in all other countries and in all times. Instead of which we find that in 1893, nearly thirty years after