Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1888 — PENSIONS. [ARTICLE]

PENSIONS.

Spirited Debate in the United Btates Senate on the Grand Army Pension Bill. Senator Vest Opposes, While MessrsPlumb and Teller Advocate Its Passage.. [Washington special.] The Grand Army pension bill was up for consideration in the Senate on Wednesday, and gave rise to a warm debate. Mr. Plnmb, of Kansas, led off in a speech favoring the measure. He adverted to the fact that when the war closed the army could have placed one of its leaders at th» head of the Government and could have dictated its own terms, but bad asked nothing except to be permitted to disband and return to peaces at avocations. He did not believe that any patriotic man, any man who looked with patriotic fervor on that portion of the country’s history when 2,000,006 men sprang to arms to maintain the Government would ever be willing to oppose the enactment of any law whereby any of the men should be drawn from the ban of poverty, and given at least a decent livelihood. The bill as it came from tho committee was not what it ought to be, and he had sought to make it better. There was to be, he said, no insinuation in the Senate or elsewhere that the Union soldiei-8 were to be the beneficiaries under the bill in the sense of being supplicants or unworthy persons. He did not think that partisanship would go that far, and if it did he believed the main principle would refute it. Less than the pending bill proposed would not be just; more was not asked for. Mr. Vest attacked the pending measurS. Why, he asked, this talk that Congress bad not done enough for the Union soldiers, when the country had paid out since 186& $883,000,000 for pensions—a liberality unparalleled in the history of the world? Ths report of the Commissioner of Pensions shows that when the arrears of pensions act of 1879 was passed there were some 30,000 applications for pensions pending. The very next year the number of applications jumped to 110,000. The claims agents invented tbpt law and pat a limitation on it. and the number of applications for pensions jumped in one year from 30,000 to 110,000, and the amount of disbursements from $30,000,000 to $57,000,000. Mr. Vest went on to say that of the 2,300,000 men enrolled as soldiers during the four years of the war there were applications from 1,200,000 for pensions on account of disability. Such military execution, he said, had never been known in the history of the whole world. The doors of the Republican, party were now open and Presidential candidates were coming to the front without limit as to quantity or locality. The Senatehad been engaged for 6ome days past in a political auction for the soldiers’ vote. First had come his friend from Nebraska (Manderson), backed by the Grand Army, and even that Senator’s flings at the President of the United States had not detracted from the general merit of his bid for the soldier vote. That was the object of all the de-bate-bidding for the soldier vote of the country in the coming contest. When the Senator from Nebraska had. taken his seat he (Vest) had thought thatthe bid was in his favor. But the present occupant of the chair, the Senator from. Maine (Frye), had “caught the eye of the auctioneer”—the Grand Army of the Republic—and “had gone one better.” That Senator was prepared to vote a pension to every man who had served a day in the Gederal army. He (Vest) was about to knock down the prize to the Senator Maine, when hisfriend from Kansas (Plurub) came to the front and outbid the Senator from Maine by an amendment to the bill which would increase the expenditure under it s{>o,ooo,000 or $75,000,000. He (Vest) had then been strongly of the opinion that the auction should close and the prize be given to the Senator from Kansas, but then the Senator from Illinois (Cullom) had come to the front and made a bid from that great Prairie State which staggered his (Vest’s) conviction as to the propriety of closing the sale. Since that time he has been in a condition of anxiety waiting to hear from other bidders in the great national anction. The Senate had not yet heard from his dulcet-tongued friend from lowa (Allison V nor from the distinguished Senator from Ohio (Sherman), nor from the presiding, officer (Ingalls), who had been nominated by the District of Columbia, and every one knew that the District of Columbia only acted from the most disinterested and unselfish motives. Mr. Teller replied to Mr. Vest. If there was some little diversity of opinion, he said, among the Republicans as to whowas to be their standard-bearer, hi% Democratic friends were not in that position. Their siandard- bearer was selected for them, whether they willed it or not. It was even said that arrangements had been made in the same interest for the nomination of the Governor of a certain State for Vice President. The Republicans were not disturbed by conflicting opinions and conflicting interests, even if they had a large number of prominent men who would make good Presidents; but the Democratic party was compelled to admit that it had but one man—of all the great body of men who had assembled at its last National Convention —who was asuitable and available candidate. Mr. Platt here read an extract from MrCleveland’s letter of acceptance in 1884 against the policy of a second Presidential term, and intimated that it must be a mistake to consider Mr. Cleveland a candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Mr. Teller repeated that the great Democratic party had to-day no other man whom it would dare to put in nomination, and said that it went without saying that the Democratic convention would simply meet to ratify what had already been declared. The general horde of office-seekers had made themselves heard and the mugwumps brought np the rear. The Democrats had surrendered the liberty of choice. Mr. Plumb Baid the Senator from Missouri was welcome to the position he had assumed. He had enlarged the scope of the debate, not for the special purpose of ridiculing Senators who were supposed to be presidential candidates, bnt for the purpose of arguing against the whole idea of pensions to Union soldiers, whether disabled or otherwise.