What is a support?  Who is to determine whether a man earns it, or has it, or has it not?  Is the Government to enter the homes of claimants for pension and after an examination of their surroundings and circumstances settle those questions?  Shall the Government say to one man that his manner of subsistence by his earnings is a support and to another that the things his earnings furnish are not a support?  Any attempt, however honest, to administer this law in such a manner would necessarily produce more unfairness and unjust discrimination and give more scope for partisan partiality, and would result in more perversion of the Government’s benevolent intentions, than the execution of any statute ought to permit.

If in the effort to carry out the proposed law the degree of disability as related to earnings be considered for the purpose of discovering if in any way it curtails the support which the applicant, if entirely sound, would earn, and to which he is entitled, we enter the broad field long occupied by the Pension Bureau, and we recognize as the only difference between the proposed legislation and previous laws passed for the benefit of the surviving soldiers of the Civil War the incurrence in one case of disabilities in military service and in the other disabilities existing, but in no way connected with or resulting from such service.

It must be borne in mind that in no case is there any grading of this proposed pension.  Under the operation of the rule first suggested, if there is a lack in any degree, great or small, of the ability to earn such a support as the Government determines the claimant should have, and, by the application of the rule secondly suggested, if there is a reduction in any degree of the support which he might earn if sound, he is entitled to a pension of $12.

In the latter case, and under the proviso of the proposed bill permitting persons now receiving pensions to be admitted to the benefits of the act, I do not see how those now on the pension roll for disabilities incurred in the service, and which diminish their earning capacity, can be denied the pension provided in this bill.

Of course none will apply who are now receiving $12 or more per month.  But on the 30th day of June, 1886, there were on the pension rolls 202,621 persons who were receiving fifty-eight different rates of pension from $1 to $11.75 per month.  Of these, 28,142 were receiving $2 per month; 63,116, $4 per month; 37,254, $6 per month, and 50,274, whose disabilities were rated as total, $8 per month.

As to the meaning of the section of the bill under consideration there appears to have been quite a difference of opinion among its advocates in the Congress.  The chairman of the Committee on Pensions in the House of Representatives, who reported the bill, declared that there was in it no provision for pensioning anyone who has a less disability than a total inability to labor, and that it was a charity measure.  The