asks the Encampment to refer to a committee to be appointed by the Commander-in-Chief.

The Report was referred to the following committee appointed by the Commander-inChief: Comrades John Lindt, of Iowa; O. H. Coulter, of Kansas, and John E. Gilman, of Massachusetts: [The report will appear in full with the report of the committee.]

The Adjutant-General announced that a committee from the National Association of Army Nurses, consisting of Mrs. Emily E. Woodley, National Counselor Army Nurses' Association, Philadelphia, Mrs. John H. Dye Germantown, and Mrs. Margaret Hamilton of Massachusetts, had called with greeting for the Encampment.

Comrade R. B. Brown of Ohio presented and read the Report of the Committee on Pensions, as follows:

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF AND COMRADES:

For a period of twenty-eight years, from 1862 forward, the United States Government granted pensions to surviving soldiers, sailors, and marines who had rendered service in the War of the Rebellion, from 1861 to 1866, who had been honorably mustered out, and who had been disabled by wounds, injuries, or disease originating during such service. At the time of enlistment, during the long months and years of arduous service, and for many years after the end of the great struggle, the large majority of the men who stood on the firing line from the opening to the close, gave but little thought to the subject of pensions. In common with their fellow-citizens who had furnished the sinews of war, they rejoiced in the coming of peace. With a devotion and patriotism unmatched in history, they bravely, patiently, and unflinchingly faced, to most of them, radically changed conditions. As the money price of a wicked attempt to destroy the government founded by the fathers, a vast national debt had been incurred; every home had been saddened by sacrifices not to be expressed in words, and maimed men everywhere reminded the soldier and citizen of the awful struggle. Heroic as defenders of the Republic in the time of war, they have been no less heroic in the grander march of the thirty and eight years that has carried us to the foremost place among the great powers of the world. No class of

citizens has more staunchly stood for the integrity of the Government and the fulfillment of every pledge made to her creditors, than they who wore the blue in the sixties. These men, with no wavering, no halting, and no stragglers to mar the symmetry of the lines, have stood in solid phalanx demanding that all the world shall respect the Nation's flag, and all that is implied in its presence, at home or abroad. They have cheerfully borne the burdens which come to the citizen and have had no small share in the mighty development which marks our national progress during the last third of the century so nearly closed.

Your Committee on Pensions in this presence comes to this Thirty-third Encampment, not to eulogize or criticise, but to discharge a soldierly duty in the plain statement of plain facts. It is confidently affirmed that no representative assembly ever convened within the limits of the United States has manifested greater concern for honor and purity in public affairs than the premier body of the Grand Army of the Republic. Conservative, dignified and respectful always, the National Encampment has never yet appealed in vain to the American public for a hearing on matters to which it might properly address itself. The soldiers and sailors of the Republic have naught to fear when once their cause is fairly understood. Reason, not passion; argument, not invective, become men who are marching down the western slope of life.

The Nation's obligations to its defenders and their dependent ones present an important problem, not necessarily difficult of solution, however ponderous it may become. We have demonstrated our ability as a nation to honorably treat one class of creditors, and it ought not to be difficult to apply the same principles on precisely the same lines to the other. Shoulder to shoulder they met and vanquished a common enemy, and preserved to mankind a common inheritance. The reward of one was evidenced by obligations justly valued and honored in all the money centres of the civilized world. A grateful people will not fail to keep the compact with the other, for only in the faithful discharge of that obligation can national honor be maintained.

The pension question and the pensioner have been discussed quite as much, perhaps, as any other feature of national administration. It is not a new problem, it is not to be put aside, nor can the truth long be veiled by those who would juggle with the rights

of the old veteran and his dependent ones. The pension question has received the best attention of the Camp Fire orator and the politician on the stump, and the veteran of the sixties, conscious of the value of his service to an imperiled nation, and realizing in his own body the awful cost to him, now demands, and rightly demands, the fulfillment of the terms of a solemn contract. He expects this much from friend or foe, and with less than this he will not be content. When he wore the blue no sacrifice was counted too great; all that he had he freely, gladly, and manfully gave. Under no possible conditions did he stop to reckon the cost, nor summon to his aid expert chroniclers that they might furnish his government with the minutest details of even a single day's history in his soldier career. When tired Nature pleaded for rest and a pain-racked body cried out for repose, he kept his place in the ranks, grimly intent on a soldier's duty, little dreaming of the priceless value and logic of a hospital record in future pension administration. Here, as in all departments of government, differences arise in the construction of law, policy of administration and the application of general principles, and here, as in all things human, the exercise of saving common sense should have free play. As it is impossible to set up a standard by which accurately to measure the value of the services of the Union soldiers, so now it seems an equally hopeless task to adequately determine the reward for that service as expressed in the pension roll of the Government. The Grand Army of the Republic does not now, nor did it ever, seek such an adjustment. The record of achievements belongs to the ages; the victories won by the Union arms enrich, ennoble, and bless mankind. The Grand Army has always demanded, and does yet demand, that no worthy defender of the Republic, his widow or orphan, shall be compelled to bear all the burdens growing out of the sacrifice.

Prior to the passage of the Act of June 27th, 1890, it was necessary, under the then existing law granting pensions to soldiers and sailors who had rendered service in the War of 1861-5, and who were disabled by wounds, injuries, or disease originating during such service, as a condition precedent to the granting of pension, that the applicant furnish proof establishing the fact that the disabling cause had its origin in the line of duty during such service. In case of the heir of a deceased soldier or sailor of such

war claiming pension, it was necessary to establish the fact that the death of the soldier or sailor was due to a cause having its origin in the military or naval service. The evidence required to connect the origin of disability with the service was that of a commissioned. officer or two enlisted men of a soldier's company and regiment, who could testify from personal knowledge as to the time, place, and circumstances of the origin in the service of the disabling or death cause. It was also required, in many cases, in the absence of a hospital record showing treatment of the soldier while in the service, that the testimony of a regimental surgeon be furnished, showing such treatment.

In addition it was required that the physical condition of the soldier upon his discharge and return home from the service be shown by medical or other satisfactory evidence, and that the continuance of the disabilities alleged to have been incurred while in the military or naval service be clearly shown during all of the years since the soldier's discharge from such service.

As a quarter of a century had elapsed since the close of the War of the Rebellion, and death had reaped his annual harvest from among the survivors of that great contest, and men who served in the same organizations therein had removed from the places in which such organizations were gathered together, and their whereabouts had become unknown to their former comrades, it had become more and more difficult to furnish the testimony required to establish a claim under the then existing laws granting pensions and the requirements as to proof established thereunder.

Owing to the inability of applicants to furnish the claim of proof complete in every link, as required by the law and the regulations established thereunder, the files of the Pension Office were crowded with hundreds of thousands of meritorious claims, in many of which the proof necessary to establish title was nearly complete, but in which some detail was not covered, which fact prevented favorable action upon the case. In every community were soldiers who were known to their neighbors as having entered the army early in the war and in the prime of vigorous manhood, and to have returned broken in body and strength, or to have broken down after returning and to have been unable to earn a livelihood since the war by reason of their disabilities, and who, being unable to furnish the full measure of the proof required to establish a claim under the

then existing law, were unable to obtain a pension and in their advancing age were compelled to face the prospect of becoming a public charge. In many cases of the heirs of deceased soldiers proof of the origin in the military service of the death cause was lacking and impossible, aud widows and orphans of deceased soldiers were a charge upon surviving comrades or upon the commumunity in which they resided.

These conditions led to the seeking of a remedy therefor. After exhaustive debates by Congress and the passage of a measure which failed to meet executive approval, the effort for relief culminated in the passage of the Act of June 27th, 1890

As to the necessity for the enactment of this law, it was well said by the Hon. Cushman K. Davis, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Pensions, in the debate preceding its passage:

"The difference between this bill and the pension policy as it is now is that, whereas under present pension legislation it is necessary by competent proof, prescribed in a particular manner by the Bureau of Pensions, to trace the disability or death directly to the casualties of the service, this bill, as in the bill which passed in the Forty-ninth Congress, and as in the bill which passed the Senate in the Fiftieth Congress, makes that unnecessary, and makes it only requisite to prove that the soldier either died or suffered from mental or physical disability, no matter when or how incurred, whether in the service or not.

The principal reasons for this outside of and apart from its natural justice inhere in the fact that in the lapse of time since the war the mode of proof prescribed by the Pension Bureau, and by the law as it now is, and indeed any mode of proof by which it is required to attribute and trace the disease or the death by force of pathological connection to the casualties or hardships of the service, has become so difficult that in the majority of cases it is impossible to procure it. So there seems to have been, among the people who favor this kind of legislation, for some years, and it has ripened into an absolute conviction, strengthened as it is by the undoubted fact that not a man went into the war and served through its infinite casualties and hardships and came out as well as he was before and without the seeds of disease in his constitution-I say it has become the deliberate conviction of those who favor liberalized legislation of this character that the technical bar in the way of