THE demand for new pensions and pension bills goes on increasing. A bill has now passed by which every man who was in the army three months, even if he never heard a gun fired, may have a pension for life of $12 per month, if he can give some evidence that he is out of health and cannot well support himself. This is a step beyond any pension law, ever passed in any country, so far as I know; for all previous laws have made it essential that the ill health should have been incurred while in military service. The effect of the law in demoralizing and disabling our veteran soldiers, as they grow older, will be in my opinion simply enormous; but this is not the place for the discussion of that general theme. What I wish to point out is that the tendency of this and almost all pension legislation now under discussion leads logically up to something that has never yet been proposed, so far as I know—a service pension for all women employed during the war as hospital nurses or in the Sanitary Commission. The tendency of all pension legislation is onward, so long as there is a spare dollar in the Public Treasury. Soon, by all appearance, there will be absolutely no men of military service left to pension, because they will all be included. Had this bill become a law, all those who are ill would have $12 a month, and if the bill asked for by many Grand Army Posts becomes a law, every veteran who has the misfortune to be in decent health will at least have $8 per month. That will provide for all the men who were in service, even including those who were three months on duty in the forts of Boston or New York harbor. If these bills be carried through, every man who held a musket, even if unloaded, will be pensioned; and the next step must inevitably include the women. For one, I cannot conceive how they can be left out.
     There is, it is true, a class of men whose claims are intermediate between those of the soldiers and those of the women. There were many men who, being rejected from enlistment for physical defects, sought honorably to serve their country as hospital nurses or agents of the Sanitary Commission. A beginning has been made in the way of pensioning these men in the case of the proposed pension for Mr. Whitman, the poet; although he he [sic], is not wholly an instance in point, having been a man of conspicuously fine physique, but who deliberately preferred service in the hospital rather than in the field. This fact, however, only strengthens the case for women. If it is just to pension a man who might have been a soldier, but preferred not to be, how much stronger is the case of those women who would thankfully have been soldiers, but could not be! That there are many such women there is no question; that there are women who sacrificed their health in the service of their country is certain. Why should they go without a pension if Mr. Whitman receives one? If it is said that he earned the gratitude of the soldiers whom he nursed, the same is true of hundreds who never thought of boasting of it, or letting their friends boast of it. If he is now growing old and in poor health, so are they. If it be said that they are probably unmarried, with no one dependent upon them, so is he. The difference is that he has had during all these years a man's advantage over women in variety of employment and standard of compensation, that he has had a wide literary reputation, and was said by the newspapers to have made seven hundred dollars by his last lecture in Philadelphia. Granting, then, for the sake of argument, that it is altogether expedient and desirable that he should henceforth be supported at the public expense, it seems even more desirable and expedient that this should be done for such women as I have described.
     "Mother Bickerdyke," as she was called, was known throughout the armies of the West as a person who shrank from no toil, shirked no duty, avoided no exposure, was deaf to no call, where the soldiers were to be helped or her country served. The same was true, in the armies of Virginia, of Clara Barton; wherever the front line moved, there moved she, her little wagon of supplies always keeping close to it, like a rearguard. Both these women came out of the war with impaired health, which has never, I believe, been restored, though both of them have still made their great energies felt in other fields of labor. When Mrs. Hoge went with sanitary supplies into the very rifle-pits before Vicksburg, with the bullets whizzing over her head, the regimental commander told her that each visit was worth a victory; that the men would have no other topic of conversation for weeks afterward; that all agreed that she was an angel, and looked exactly like each man's wife or mother. When Mrs. Livermore, after clearing $100,000 for the Sanitary Commission by her great Chicago fair, was sent to make a tour of the hospitals and military posts on the Mississippi River, she found everywhere men sick or wounded whose regiments had been ordered away and had left them—men who were unfit for further service, and yet could not be discharged, because they had no descriptive lists. Finding in one place twenty-three such men huddled together in an improvised hospital, without proper surgical care, she went to General Grant and said, "General, if you will give me authority to do so, I willtake every one of those men to his home, unless he dies on the way"; and she did it, one at least dying before he reached Wisconsin. Will any man who remembers the war period seriously say that Mr. Whitman should be pensioned for hospital service, and women like these ignored?
     But if I am called upon to go farther, and say whether I am in favor of any or all these pensions for hospital service, I should be compelled to declare opposition to them all. We have already in our pension laws gone beyond the limit of reason, if not of justice. Mr. Edward Atkinson has just been pointing out how much we gain in this country by exemption from the vast expenses of European standing armies. But the regular annual pension appropriation bill just passed by Congress is three-fourths as large as the cost of the whole German military establishment, while if the new pension bill becomes a law, this amount will be more than doubled. But apart from this, no man who is not familiar with ex-soldiers can appreciate the temptation brought to bear upon every man, as life goes on, and time brings infirmities, to convince himself that but for his few months or years of army service he would be exempt from all physical ills, and would live without a sick day until the age of ninety. There are hundreds of men who were in the war what General Bragg, with unusual frankness, called "the rubbish of the army," who now find it, in view of recent pension legislation, profitable to be poor, and picturesque to be worthless. Worse than this, there are many estimable persons whom a single twinge of rheumatism starts on the same downward track. I confess myself reluctant to see a similar temptation held out to either poets or women. 

                                                                                                                                             T. W. H.

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