Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/252

228 the war, the pension roll had risen to 966,012 names, and the amount paid out to $156,740,467.14. This year it is still larger, and the number of new applications for pensions is incredible. In the seven months ending last October no less than 55,399 of them came into the Pension Office. There are, according to the last report of the commissioner, 711,150 claims, original and for increase in the office still to be acted upon. The number of names on the pension roll, not counting the applicants, is much larger than was the number of men in active service at any period of the war. We are paying more for pensions than all other nations together. Our pension expenditure is heavier than the expenditure of the largest military Power on earth for its military establishment.

In the face of these fabulous figures the assertion that our pension system is a worthy monument of the generous gratitude of the American people sounds like a fiendish mockery. We need only look at its history to conclude that it is rather a monument to the audacity and skill of our public plunderers, to the cowardice of our politicians and to an enduring patience of our general public, which has long ceased to be a virtue. No people have ever been more shamelessly victimized than the American people have been in this pension business. Our deserving soldiers and sailors had been abundantly provided for, with far greater generosity than any other country could boast of, by the pension legislation that was enacted during and immediately after the war. Everybody would have been satisfied had not pension attorneys hungry for fees, and politicians hungry for votes, kept telling the veterans that they ought to have more. Still, legislation kept within bounds, and the pension roll began actually to decrease, as in the natural course of things it was bound to do, until, twelve years after the war, the “arrears-of-pensions act” was passed. This act, putting