Wanton Extravagance in Government
By George W. Rine
URS is an age of wanton prodigality. In the realm of politics as well as in that of society, extravagance has attained a magnitude unparalleled even in the days of the decadent Rome. Glance at the expense history of our own country. One hundred years ago there were six million people in the republic. Now there are somewhat more than ninety millions, or fifteen-fold as many. Also in President Jefferson's time, $5,000,000 was paid to run the Government a year; whereas to-day the annual cost of Government goes two hundred millions beyond the billion-dollar mark. Fifteen-fold the population; two-hundred-and-forty-fold the cost! A sensible difference! Now observe how the climbing tale of national expense has run. The annual cost of Government in Madison's time was $8,000,000; in Monroe's, $11,000,000; in Jackson's, $13,000,000; in Polk's, $27,500,000; in 1860, the last year of Buchanan, a moiety over $55,000,000. Then came the Civil War, and the story of our national expense has been taking titanic leaps ever since. Until 1860 the governmental expense matched the population, and kept step with it at the ratio of a dollar a head. It is now nearly fourteen dollars per capita. This stream of swelling extravagance is chargeable to both the big parties, altho the Republicans have dominated our politics almost continuously since 1861. Crying against "a billion-dollar Congress," the people, in 1890, turned the Republicans out. Now we have two-and-a-half-billion-dollar Congresses. The Lavish Granting of Pensions
A year after the close of the Civil War, our Government paid $15,000,000 to disabled soldiers, their widows and orphans and other dependents. In 1874 the yearly pension bill had grown to $31,000,000. Then it began a natural decline. By 1878 it had fallen to $28,000,000. In 1879 there was passed a law giving full arrears to all persons entitled to pensions. In two years the pension bill bounded from $28,000,000 to $58,000,000. The Grand Army of the Republic, organized at the close of the war, now fell into the hands of pension promoters, Corporal Tanner, a professional pension agent, at its head. A succession of Grand Army pension agents administered the Government's Pension Bureau. "God help the surplus in the United States treasury when I get at it," said Corporal Tanner when President Harrison appointed him Commissioner of Pensions. The yearly bill went steadily up until in 1889 it reached $92,000,000. In 1890 the bill leaped to $110,000,000. And up it kept going until in 1893 it reached the colossal sum of $161,000,000. In 1908 Congress extended the granting of pensions to widows of ninety-day men, without regard to their pecuniary need. Hence the bill of 1909 swelled to the unprecedented total of $165,000,000. More than three fourths of the soldiers who survived the Civil War, and of the widows of Civil War soldiers, are dead. Yet to-day, nearly a half century after the close of that war, the Government is laying upon every man, woman, and child in the land a tax of two dollars a year for military pensions. As the war recedes in time the pension tax increases. We all gladly concede that every soldier who was disabled in the service of his country is entitled to a liberal pension from his grateful compatriots. Every widow of a soldier killed or disabled in the service of his country, and every dependent upon him, is entitled to relief from needs due to his patriotic devotion. But according to the testimony of Mr. William Bayard Hale and other reliable authorities, the Government is paying out millions of dollars in pensions, each year, to persons who are in no way either justly or legally entitled to pension. The act of June 7, 1888, removed all limitations as to the date on which a widow might file her claim; that is, a woman might inform the Government years after a veteran's death that she was his widow, and collect in one sum a widow's pension from the date of his death. This act, Mr. Hale maintains, is one of the most fruitful of fraud, and has resulted in the filing of thousands of swindling claims. It has led to organizations of criminal pension attorneys in no less an enterprise than the manufacture of widows for dead soldiers. In his report of 1899, Commissioner Evans pointed out that the records of national cemeteries had been brought into use for the purpose of learning the names and services of those buried there. Women were then hunted up who would undertake to pose as relatives of dead veterans. These women signed applications; cases were made out by means of stock witnesses, the attorneys pocketing the large first payment, leaving the fraudulent widow to draw the subsequent payments. The pension officials maintain that it was practically impossible to disprove a marriage alleged to have taken place thirty or forty years before. Mr. Hale, named above, in his series of articles, under the caption, "The Pension Carnival," published in the "World's Work," cites scores of specific cases of such fraudulent-widow pensioners. In round numbers, $5,000,000 is yearly paid out to persons each of whom has been made a pensioner by the enactment into law of a special pension bill. During the first ten years after the war, 537 special acts were passed; during the next decade, 773; during the next, 4,073; during the next ten years, 2,800; during the last nine years, more than 25,000. As long ago as 1886 President Cleveland said, "If the veterans of the war knew all that was going on in the way of granting pensions by private bills, they would be more disgusted than any other class of our citizens." Mr. Hale has produced evidence overwhelming in magnitude and irrefutable in character, proving that a very large majority of the persons who have become the Government's beneficiaries by special pension acts, are utterly undeserving. I beg to refer the reader to Mr. Hale's articles in the "World's Work," October, 1910, to March, 1911, inclusive. Mr. Hale makes the following thought-provoking statement: "It is questionable whether the regular pension laws are so narrow and stingy that it has been necessary to pass special acts for the pensioning of 30,000 persons not entitled to pensions under the laws." Is it not questionable, too, whether girls born twenty-five years after Appomattox should be pensioned by the Government because they took a fancy to, and married, some decrepit veteran with good prospects of an early death? Actual cases have been discovered where two and even three persons have drawn pension for one man's service; also cases where the payment of pensions has been continued for years after the true beneficiaries were dead; cases where one man has drawn several pensions; many cases where DESERTERS are receiving pay equal to that of men who served gallantly to the end; cases where men absolutely without military records have been given, by special legislation, an enlistment and honorable discharge; numberless cases where soldiers are given compensation for ills utterly unconnected with military service; and cases where women never married to soldiers are pensioned as lawful widows. Indeed, the attitude of Congress toward pension claimants has become so madly extravagant that it sometimes goes beyond the mere correcting of records and actually undertakes to CREATE a record from non-existing facts. Mr. A. L. Drummond, for many years chief of the Government Secret Service, once suggested to a number of congressmen the establishment of a secret service department in the Pension Bureau. Drummond's own words are: "I told the members of Congress that if that body would appropriate $100,000 for the establishment of an investigating bureau attached to the Pension Office, and put the Government Secret Service in charge of it, I believed I could in the first year REDUCE THE PENSION PAYMENTS TWENTY MILLIONS OF DOLLARS." Thirty-one years ago General Garfield, in reporting the annual bill appropriating less than $30,000,000 for pensions, declared that this sum would be the maximum, and that it would gradually decrease until the Pension Bureau should send out its last check and close up its business. Instead of Garfield's prophecy being realized, the pension bill since that time has multiplied itself by five and a fraction and merrily goes on multiplying. The Hon. Wayne MacVeagh recently declared that if only those who deserved pensions received them, $100,000,000 a year in pensions alone would be saved. The present Commissioner of Pensions, Mr. J. L. Davenport, in his latest annual report shows that the total number of pensioners on the roll at the close of 1910 was 921,083 — an army more than eleven times as large as the total enlisted force of the United States army to-day. Marble Palaces for Congress
About five years ago the erection of two sumptuously elegant marble palaces was completed in Washington. They were built by authority of the Government, one for the comfort and convenience of the members of the Lower House of Congress, and the other for those of the Upper House. Mr. MacVeagh informs his readers, in his famous "Appeal to President Taft," published in the "North American Review," February, 1911, that the original cost of these palaces was $6,000,000, an amount equal to the total earnings for a whole year of 10,000 members of the unskilled working class. To maintain these edifices, allowing interest on their cost, with the necessary repairs and attendance, will probably cost $600,000 a year, or the total earnings for a whole year of 1,000 members of the same unhappy class. Now, allowing five members to a family, the cost of those palaces represents the entire means of livelihood of 50,000 people for a whole year. Mr. MacVeagh says: "These palaces are reported to be provided with such waste in mahogany furniture, marble bathrooms, and even velvet cushions for the repose of the heads of wearied statesmen, as formerly could be seen only in the seraglio of an Eastern sultan. Before our Congress wasted these millions of the people's money on themselves, they were far more luxuriously provided for, and at far greater cost, than any other legislative body in the world." Mr. MacVeagh declares that this11wanton expenditure merits special reprobation. In March, 1909, George von L. Meyer was appointed Secretary of the Navy. He is a trained business man. He lost no time to examine personally every navy-yard on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He found that the United States has over twice as many first-class navy-yards as Great Britain, which has a navy at least double the size of ours; and that we have one more navy-yard of the second class than Great Britain has. In the five years previous to 1909 the eleven American yards cost $40,000,000 for maintenance. During the same time the seven home navy-yards of Great Britain cost only $7,000,000 for maintenance. At the New Orleans yard $1,040 worth of work was done in 1907. The maintenance of the yard that year cost $97,178, and $309,000 was expended there for improvements. Between 1902 and 1908 a dry dock was built at Charleston, South Carolina, at a cost of $1,250,000. Secretary Meyer declares this dry dock to be practically useless, "as it fills in opposite the dock at the rate of from three to four feet a year." Through the influence of Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, the Government built, at an expense of more than a million, another dry dock at Port Royal, South Carolina. Concerning this naval station Secretary Meyer says, "It is unapproachable for battle-ships, or even cruisers, except at unjustifiable expense." The secretary attests the fact that the volume of money expended in the construction and maintenance of these naval stations has been a sheer waste. When, in March, 1899, Senator Tillman succeeded in having Congress vote the appropriation necessary to build the Port Royal navy-yard, he expressed himself concerning it, on the floor of the Senate, as follows: "This bill [naval appropriation] is loaded down with expansion in every navy-yard. I am trying to get a little for Port Royal; because if you are going to steal, I want my share." As early as 1885, Secretary W. C. Whitney estimated that there had been, since 1868, an absolute waste of $70,000,000 in the United States navy. The proprietor of "McClure's Magazine" declares that the ANNUAL waste to-day reaches about half that great sum. Alfred Henry Lewis makes bold to assert that we are fortifying the Hawaiian Islands at a cost equal to four times their value, and that the Philippines lose us more than one hundred millions a year. He says further: "Be assured of this: the nation now costing one billion two hundred million a year, can be run for four hundred millions; and be as much of a world's force as in the thirteen-million day of the Iron Jackson, when he drove France to do us justice at the muzzle of the gun." Mr. MacVeagh is authority for the following statement: "Even Senator Aldrich [now Ex-Senator] confessed that under the administration of Roosevelt and that of Taft $300,000,000 was being wasted yearly by each Congress." It is obvious that this carnival of extravagance in the affairs of Government is a prime cause of the tremendously increased cost of living in these opening years of the new century. The people pay the bills, altho they generally do not realize the fact because of the INDIRECT method of Federal taxation. We pay it by paying more for all that we eat, wear, and use. To those living in these "last days," the apostle James prophetically addressed the following significant words: "Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been WANTON." How aptly the word "wanton" expresses the blind, reckless prodigality of present-day politics!