The National tribune. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1877-1917, 1903-04-09
IT'S commENpABLE SIMPLICITY.

IT'S CoMMENDABLE SIMPLICITY.
Powerfully in favor of the $12-a-Month
Service Pension. that we propose, is its
exceeding simplicity.
| Heaven knows, the veterans have strug-
gled long enough through the wilderness
of red tape, baffled, torn and tripped up
ut every step by the brambles and snares
of the claws glorious uncertainties.
They have had sufficient of that expe-
rience to last several generations, and
want no more of it during the rest of their
| lives.
They have seen laws passed for their
| benefit which at the time of enactment
| seemed so plain and unmistakable that
the wayfaring man, though he be fool,
| need not err therein, afterward so comfort
ed and twisted by the officials executing
them as to lose most of their original
semblance.
Nothing could have been palmer than
the Act of June 81, 1890, and yet see what
strange, wholly unexpected things it was
made to mean by Lochren and Evans.
For 40 years now applicants for pen
sions have been stripped. pounded,
thumped and wrenched by the Examining
Surgeons. They have been spectroscoped,
laryngoscoped, stethoscoped, ophthalmo-
scoped-and moscoped-auscultated
and dialyzed. Callow medical fledglings
have paved over them as interesting
relics; graybeards have studied them as
extraordinary survivals: country prac-
titioners nave sent in voluminous reports
of them, to exhibit their scientific knowi-
edge, and the medical sharps in the Pen
sion Bureau have used them as clubs to
beat their rural brethren into becoming
sense of their ignorance and unworthi-
ress. The Examining Surgeons have
been reaping a harvest of 100000 year
for making profound studies of them, and
the Medical Referees Division has been
getting proportionately liberal pay for
knocking the results of the examinations
into a cooked hat.
And when the Medical Division of the
Pension Bureau has wearied of the game,
the Legal Division has taken it up with
quite as much zeal. The claimants have
been shuttlecocked back and forward be-
tween the attorneys and the Law Divl-
sion, between the Commissioner of Pen
sions and the Board of Pension Appeals,
with the Special Examiners butting into
the game whenever the others got tired,
and they saw n chance to make some
reputation and increase of salary. Con-
gress has been appealed to, the Supreme
Court of the United States invoked, and
the President importuned, while the news
papers of the country have had spasms
threatening fatal results.
We may have been able to stand all this
when we were much younger, but now,
approaching the age when the almond tree
| flourishes and the grasshopper becomes
burden, it is too much.
Let US put stop to it all by the pas
sage of plain, straight S12-a-Month-
Service Pension to every man who served
at least 80 days, and was honorably dis
charged. Let us have all this clubbing
about whether disabled for the perform
ance of manual labor" means what Pres
| ident Harrison said it did, or what Cleye-
! land said it did, by making 80 days ser
vice the sole requisite, and an honorable
discharge mans pension warrant.
Let pension attorneys, with their calls
for additional evidence and more postage;
let Examining Surgeons. with their ag-
gravating and huiniliating inspections; let
the Medical Referee with his new library
of freshly coined Technology to fire at the
country doctors; let the Law Division,
| with IFS legal SlarpS: let the nOsing goS-
sip-gathering Special Examiners, with
their coveted So per diem and expenses,
all go together, as tiresome and useless
superfluities.
Identity should be the only proof re-
quired. The records of the War Depart
ment will furnish the rest.
For every veteran of 30 days service,
and his widow, $12 month, with an hon
orable discharge the sole pension warrant.
|