Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 October 1884 — The Pension Machine. [ARTICLE]

The Pension Machine.

At the close of the war there were about 100,000 pensioners; now there are 300,000. Then there were 169 clerks in the Pension Office; now there are 1,500, Then the annual payments were about $1,500,000; now the office expenses alone are greater than that sum by $400,000, and the payments reach $60,000,000. When a great building is started the men work for weeks getting up the- derricks; thus the veterans must nowadays watch the muster-ing-in of a preliminary army of 1,500 and the preliminary expenditure of nearly $2,000,000 before they can hope to get a cent of a grateful nation’s money. The whole thing is stupendous and previously unheard of. In 1882 a Representative arose in the House-and-said: “I move that- the rules be sus pended and the pension appropriation bill be passed without debate. ” It was so done, and the bill appropriated $100,000,000 —as much as Napoleon used in going to Moscow and starting with a million men—the cost to him of Eylau and Wagram put together—more by twenty million than had been paid to all our pensioners previous to the firing on Sumter. This Pension Office is too large and its cost is excessive. Besides, all the stump-speech buncombe and flapdoodle of recent years has been pigeon-holed in its divisions. The statesmen should lend themselves honestly to the task of simplifying this pension machine. Put the Indians with the veterans, and send away some of the work of the Washington offices. More could be done at twelve agencies. The thing ih too highly centralized and too highly organized. The public treasury is no mulberry tree on which tax-eaters are to spend a luxurious existence spinning red tape.r— Chicago Current.