Page:Viscount Hardinge and the Advance of the British Dominions into the Punjab.djvu/44

40 In 1829, as Secretary at War, Sir Henry Hardinge revised and consolidated the system of pensions which had existed since 1806. The necessity for this revision arose from the fact that the number of pensioners of fourteen years' service and upwards had increased since 1817 from 64,000 to 84,000, and including the artillery to 94,000; while the number of admissions to the list exceeded the number of deaths by 500 annually. Under the existing system, 1715 men had been pensioned off at the average age of twenty-four years, most of whom had completed only four or five years' service. That short-service soldiers should be pensioned for life at so early an age was attributable in a great measure to a statute of George III, under which soldiers' pensions, formerly dependent upon royal bounty, became vested interests under the guarantee of an Act of Parliament. Moreover, pensions were often granted to men discharged for every sort of military crime, contrary no doubt to what were the intentions of Parliament.

All this could only be corrected, according to the views of Sir H. Hardinge, by cancelling all previous warrants and substituting a fresh system. Under the new warrant, soldiers of only fourteen years' service were allowed a temporary and conditional pension; while long and faithful service was duly recognised. It, was, at the same time, not retrospective. The pension for wounds remained the same as had been laid down in 1812; but the rate for length of service was increased from 1s. to 1s. 2d. per diem after certain