Deseret evening news. [volume] (Great Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1867-1920, 1898-02-05

foreign countries and draw their money
| from us. The remainder are scattered
| over the United States from Florida to
| Maine and from Massachusetts, to Cali
| fornia, and the streams of money
| which flow here and are damned up
| In the treasury are turned into the
| great pension irrigating bitches every
year and carry this golden flood to all
| parts of the country.
THE WORK OF THE PENSION OF
FICE.
During our walk through the pension
| office Commissioner Evans and myself
spent some time In each of the dI-
| visions watching the hundred Of clerks
| at work. There were old and Young
men among them,and there were plenty
of old and young women. / asked n
number of questions as to the effici-
| ency of the employees, and was told that
while the most of them were very eff
cient clerks, some were little good ex-
cept to tie up papers. One man told me
the poorest clerks he had were the old
schoolmasters. and another said the
girls in his bureau were of less value
than the men. One chief of n division
said some OF his best employees were
colored, and he pointed as n piece of
camel coal, who, he said could take
the heart out of a pension case quicker
than any man he had There are ex-
aminers and clerks scattered over the
country, so that, all told. Commissioner
Evans has about 1000 men under him
an army more than half as large as
that which Xenophon led on his fam
Gus march to the sea. In one division
/ found about rs doctors. These men
pass upon the medical testimony, and
they can see a misstatement In the evil
dence If 1t is not very carefully COW
cred. All of them have studied medl-
cine and not n few of them have been
o,stl Iva. a,tt N.
is largely made up of lawyers, who pass
on the legal aspect of certain cases,
and another might be said to be made
up OF detectives. for 1t is their business
TO ferret out frauds.
a great part of the work of our
congressman consists in pushing along
pension cases. There are now an aver
age of about five hundred congrpsslon-
al calls every day, and during the last
four days more than two thousand
congressional applications for informa-
ton have been received. Each of these
necessitates the looking up of the pa
pers in certain case.
WHAT ONE PENSION CASE MEANS
Since the close of the war more than
two million claims for pensions have
been filed, and of these more than
million and n half have been allowed.
There are hundreds of thousands of ad-
dltionai claims filed for increase of
widow and children are kept
on the rolls and single pension
case means an enormous amount of
work and money. Every one of the |
claims. both those granted and those |
pending, has to be kept by itself And |
when 1t Is remembered that n single |
claim comprises In some cases enough |
papers to fill n peck measure. you get |
some idea of the enormous work of the |
Office. The claims are separated into |
different divisions. according to the |
part of the country in which the claim |
ant lives Each claim has O. number,
and the papers concerning 1t are so
arranged that any one of them can be
found in moment. Each claim con-
tains biography of the man, who asks
for the pension. and there is no BIZ
ographcal dictionary SO full of inter-
esting things as that comprised in the
files of the pension Office. II a man has
ever done mean thing in his life he |
had better not apply for a pension, for
many crime is on record here.
BEWARE OF WIDOWS.
If Uncle Sam could speak to the
young republics of South America, who
are now and then on the verge Of war,
am sure he would advise them Just as
Sam Weller's father advised him when
he said, beware of the widows" The
widows of our old soldiers multiply like
he sands of the seashore,. Nearly one
fourth of the nine hundred odd thou
sand names on the pension rolls are
those of widows. There are almost
quarter of million widows receiving
pensions, and the widows are increas-
Ing In number every year. ! spent
some time in the division which has to
10 with soldiers OF the war of 1912.
There are only seven survivors of that
war on the pension roll, but there are
$50 widows who are receiving pen |
'ions because they married old soldiers
Who fought during the war. There are
oday almost as many Mexican war
Widows as there are Mexican war
'eterans receiving pensions. The Mex
can war was over fifty years ago, and
oday there are ten thousand men and