at purpose have been administered with great
liberality and have been supplemented by numerous private acts to reach
special cases, there has not until now been an avowed departure from the
principle thus far adhered to respecting Union soldiers, that the bounty
of the Government in the way of pensions is generously bestowed when
granted to those who, in this military service and in the line of
military duty, have to a greater or less extent been disabled.

But it is a mistake to suppose that service pensions, such as are
permitted by the second section of the bill under consideration, are new
to our legislation. In 1818, thirty-five years after the close of the
Revolutionary War, they were granted to the soldiers engaged in that
struggle, conditional upon service until the end of the war or for a
term not less than nine months, and requiring every beneficiary under
the act to be one "who is, or hereafter by reason of his reduced
circumstances in life shall be, in need of assistance from his country
for support." Another law of a like character was passed in 1828,
requiring service until the close of the Revolutionary War; and still
another, passed in 1832, provided for those persons not included in the
previous statute, but who served two years at some time during the war,
and giving a proportionate sum to those who had served not less than six
months.

A service-pension law was passed for the benefit of the soldiers of 1812
in the year 1871, fifty-six years after the close of that war, which
required only sixty days' service; and another was passed in 1878,
sixty-three years after the war, requiring only fourteen days' service.

The service-pension bill passed at this session of Congress, thirty-nine
years after the close of the Mexican War, for the benefit of the
soldiers of that war, requires either some degree of disability or
dependency or that the claimant under its provisions should be 62 years
of age, and in either case that he should have served sixty days or been
actually engaged in a battle.

It will be seen that the bill of 1818 and the Mexican pension bill,
being thus passed nearer the close of the wars in which its
beneficiaries were engaged than the others--one thirty-five years and
the other thirty-nine years after the termination of such wars--embraced
persons who were quite advanced in age, assumed to be comparatively few
in number, and whose circumstances, dependence, and disabilities were
clearl