The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1886-07-14

served faithfully for four long years
and had fought bravely in hundred
battles" His reasons were, in a ma
jority of cases, that the pension bureau,
established and equipped for the express
purpose of adjudicating pension claims,
had rejected them on grounds that
were tenable under the rules of the de-
partment. III his messages to congress
he suggests that if the present law be
not sufficient to meet all the neces-
stiles of the business they should amend
it, while every lawyer knows that the
more they amend and the more they
extend the law, the more likely they
are to have exceptional cases that have
to be rejected under some one or other
of the elaborated requirements. The
pension bureau is created and governed
in its action by positive law. 1t is a
court of law, and wherever there is a
court of law there is somewhere a court
of equity that supplies that wherein
the law, by reason of its universally, is
deficient" In Vermont, for instance,
where law court and an equity court
are established in every county, and
although no case, with few eXcep-
tons, is allowed in the equity court
that can be considered in the law court,
yet the dockets of the equity courts
contain about one-fifth as many cases
as the dockets of the law courts. The
pension bureau granted over eighty
thousand pensions during the last year
and probably rejected not less than
twenty thousand claims, making over
one hundred thousand cases considered
by law court. The equity side of the
pension court is congress. 1t has been
considered safer TO retain the equity
jurisdiction of pension cases in con-
gress than to confer it on the pension
bureau, 1t may, therefore, be accepted
as the ordinary natural outcome that
there should be very considerable
number of equitable cases from such
an immense business that must 90 to
court of equity for any measure of re-
lief. 1t is impossible to reach them all
by law. 1t would not be surprising if a
careful mathematical calculation would
show that thousands of petitions for
pensions ought to be expected in con-
gress where hundreds only are received
But the President, apparently alarmed
when two hundred forty cases, the
accumulation of a winters work, were
recently presented for his approval,
called to congress to "pause in its
work of granting pensions 20 needy
soldiers, their widows and dependent
relatives. He gave his veto messages
to the newspaper press of the country,
intending to create the impression that
all such cases might be settled in the
pension office, and that congress was
recklessly voting away the peoples
money, when in fact he showed his
own ignorance of the pension laws in
charging congress with doing what they
had always done before-of transacting
the proper business of one of the de-
partments. Cannot congress, that has
gone on step by step completing the
design of the pension system-which,
though imperfect in detail, viewed as a
whole presents grand and beautiful
picture of the nations Justice, human
ity and gratitude to those of its de-
Tenders who, by reason of the casualties
of war, were in any degree disabled for
the continuance of those forms of labor
or those duties of life which they
abandoned at home for the purpose of
taking up arms against its enemies
still be trusted to deal with the few
claimants who are unable to furnish
by some misfortune or other, the testi-
mony required by the fixed and proper
rules of the pension office? Those rules
exclude the testimony of the claimant
himself, of all his relatives and of all
persons interested in his claim. In
some cases nothing but Medical testi-
mony will be accepted to show the
existence of the disease for which pen
sion is claimed in the service, or its
continuance since the service. Army
surgeons and family physicians die,
making it impossible, in many worthy
cases, to furnish the requisite testi-
mony. Committees of congress con-
slider the testimony of the claimant, his
friends, comrades and neighbors, in
addition to the evidence he has filed in
the pension office, and even then they
are obliged to report against vastly more
cases than they recommend for pen
sion. Generally, pensions granted by
special acts of congress are received in
the community where the recipient re-
sides with less complaint than the ma
jority of pensions granted directly from
the OenSiOn office