oppressive burdens under which the men, women and children of old Europe groan. But this is the pass to which we have come: 86,000,000 of French and Germans pay $265,000,000 for armaments and pensions63,000,000 of Americans already pay $226,000,000. A simple sum in ratio. At our rate they would disburse $308,000,000, about $40,000,000 more than they actually do. And yet the appetite of some posts in the Grand Army whetted by the Disability Pension Bill is clamorous for more! This democratic land, neutral, industrial, and devoted to the arts of peace, is to be taxed for war reasons far beyond the dreams of the most ardent war-lord of Europe. Not long since you could scarcely open a newspaper without reading of the "demand" made by some post for a service pension.

It seems almost a waste of time and energy to say anything about avowed theoretical socialism in the face of such unavowed practical communism. But I have tried to find the most dispassionate and yet the frankest statement of its aims and the argument by which it tries to support them. It seems most tersely and candidly put by Bax in an essay first published in one of the leading English reviews and now reprinted in a volume to which it gives its title, “The Ethics of Socialism." The author claims, and he is in substantial harmony with the latest exponents of socialism, that accord: ing to its ethic every man should identify himself with humanity not in the way of selfsacrifice to other individuals as such but by the identification of the material conditions of individual well-being with those of social wellbeing. This being an economic age these conditions are economic. We ask ourselves in passing whether this is not on the whole a truthful generalization of the drift of the popular mind and the tendency of legislation. But hear the writer in his own words: "In what I may term a concrete ethic self-sacrifice can never be more than an accident. The substance of such ethic consists not in the humiliation of self before God but in the identification of self with humanity. By this we should observe is not especially to be understood the 'living for others' of the current Christian ethics which at best means sacrificing oneself for other individuals as individuals. What we here mean is . . . . that affirmation of self with or identification of self in society which in the first instance can only be brought about by the identification of the material conditions of individual well-being with those of social well-being." Put in less philosophical terms this seems to mean that we are not, as the Christian ethic claims, to live for others but on others. Legal right, not duty, is the rule of conduct. The obligations of the moral law and

the golden rule must yield to changed standards just as far and as fast as public opinion can be brought to tolerate them. The organization of the socialists is on the whole more dignified than that of the advocates of indiscriminate pensions because it is open and avowed, but as far as the latter have gone it looks as if their aims were identical. Even the German socialists, fiercest of their kind, now propose to abandon strikes and boycotts except in emergencies of the most extreme sort. They too propose to appeal to the majority. This is not caution or gentleness born of recent emancipation, as has been suggested, but shrewdness. They believe, wrongly we hope, that they no longer need force for their schemes, but that what is done every day under specious pretexts by others may be done through peaceable agitation and openly by themselves.

There is one aspect of the whole matter to which allusion has incidentally been made which deserves somewhat further emphasis. The giving and taking of money where service has been rendered are honorable acts. They are honorable in a still higher degree where necessity is relieved by an able and generous patron; as when the feeble, aged, or incapable are cared for by the state. But they are dangerous in every respect to both parties where neither service is rendered nor real want exists. The legitimately pensioned soldier is a man worthy of all respect; but the individual who masquerades as a disabled soldier where military service had nothing to do with his weakness is an impostor or self-deceived. When a great class of such men are offered and accept grants from the treasury (that is from the pockets of their fellow-citizens) not only is their own manhood destroyed, which might be endured, but there rises at once a far more serious menace to the public welfare in that their example becomes contagious. There was an old debate among the encyclopædists as to whether strong individuality be the representation of class or differentiation from class. The man who widely differs from all of his kind is eccentric; class type makes the strong personality. If this be true the pauperization of any class will produce representative paupers whose effrontery rests on the support of numbers. This is already happening, and the men with glib tongues and spurious arguments who support measures such as we are discussing grow more numerous and influential every day. We are threatened with the pauperization not of a few of the million unpensioned survivors of the late war but with the degradation of a body of citizens once the most heroic in the land. The old soldier, independent, self-respecting, and ubiquitous, should be a strong moral force in the community, an example and

inspiration to us, to our children, and perhaps to our children's children. But, alas! the prospect is otherwise. Already the decline of his influence has begun. Veterans of the army wonder why they often fail to arouse enthusiasm where once they were received with rapture. In the ordinary community, city or country, their power, which should be enormous, is nothing at all, for they are too often immovable partisans and drones without energy. The reason is surely not because the flight of time has dulled our true gratitude or diminished the luster of glorious service. As yet there is not a respectable community where a man putting forth a fraudulent claim against his fellow-man, and supporting it by false evidence, could hold up his head. This is done, however, every day in the matter of pensions. Prosecutions have been tried, but, as a rule, they fail because the jury will not convict. Now juries are in an important sense the barometer of public morality, and we are forced to confess that the country as a whole tolerates the recipients of fraudulent pensions. The reason is in part cowardice born of political affiliations, in part a general feeling that any one who can get something from the government is a clever fellow and ought to enjoy it. But the general moral sense, though degraded, revenges itself in a diminished respect for the sharpers, and secondarily on the military survivors as a class.

There are crises when the truth must be told. This is one of them. Never was there more elusive duplicity in any movement than in the whole pension agitation since 1879. It is a time which calls for men fixed in principle and conduct, fearless to proclaim the truth when branded as pessimistic and un-American, words which are nearly worn out in the service of wirepullers and job-masters. As Burke said of the repeal of the stamp act-done "in the teeth of all the old mercenary Swiss of state, in despite of all the speculators and augurs of political events, in defiance of the whole embattled legion of veteran pensioners and practiced instruments of the court, we have powerful enemies but we have faithful and determined friends and a glorious cause. We have a great battle to fight, but we have the means of fighting."

What are these means? Above all, the great Irish leader said: "Agitate, agitate, agitate." The country is not rotten: "tidal" waves or, as the phrase now is, "land-slides," of sterling

1 The letter of General Francis C. Barlow printed in the "Evening Post " of August 9, 1890, was seasonable and vigorous. To it and similar articles by soldiers and clergymen which appeared in many journals, I am indebted for important suggestions. "Other things being equal," says General Barlow," the soldier of our great army will stand higher in public estimation than his neighbors who did not share in the dangers and toils of the war, and in most States he is preferred

honesty and sound sense still occur at regular intervals on the sluggish surface of politics. And the first one to be set in motion must be that of economy. Let us be mean, stingy, if need be, in our federal taxation. After all, the chief functions of government throughout this Union are entrusted to the State members of it. In them taxation is direct and, being so, is promptly felt and carefully regulated. Last year the total of taxes levied by the States was about $70,000,000, a very reasonable sum for 62,000,000 people. Of course we may not hope under our system for direct federal taxes in the immediate future, but we may so far rouse ourselves as to demand that the sums raised indirectly shall but suffice, and barely suffice, for the expense of government. This is no place to unfold a plan, but there are able men who can and do explain feasible methods, and the necessity cannot be too strongly urged.

But agitation is not sufficient without organization. We want no new parties; constitutional government is not only hampered, it is endangered by the existence of minor political groups. But a well considered and easily understood appeal for a tax-payers' league to watch and expose the conduct of members of Congress who bind burdens of extravagance and folly on the public ought to be tried. There never was a time when free government owed more to a free press in the exposure of shams than now. Let everything be done to uphold the hands of journalists by displaying the public appreciation of fearlessness whenever shown. A group of right-minded men in every city, willing to unite and pay for the services of an active secretary to collect and disseminate abundant, ungarbled, and trustworthy evidence concerning the disability or service pension sham, would very soon correct the socialistic tendencies of pension expenditure, and shatter the false pretence of veneration which masks it. If to that were added the courage of conviction in the action of the same and similar men inside of party and out, our present wellgrounded fears would shortly vanish.

And then it seems as if we must make a passionate appeal to the hitherto unheard sane majority in the Grand Army to save their comrades from themselves. So far there have been a few influential and manly protests, but they have been inoperative. We can easily understand that those who make them shrink from to others by the civil service statutes in public employ. ments. This and his own approving conscience is the soldier's surplus reward over and above what the government agreed to pay him. This can be taken from him only by his own act in seeking to barter it for money. This indiscriminate pensioning in my judg ment is not only a great wrong to the tax-payers of this country but is fatal to its military spirit and to the manhood of the soldier."

unpopularity with comrades whose virtues all men admire. But blindness to fault and feebleness in action sometimes become criminal. Let us have, if necessary, reform from without. I can conceive of no more helpful institution to the country than a compact association of the soldiers who are self-respecting, modest, God-fearing citizens-and there are tens of thousands of them-pledged to redeem the good fame of our military service by opposition to both disability and service pensions, by demanding that the case of any deserving applicant shall be adjudicated by local officials, judges, or State officers, without regard to technicalities of evidence, and by securing, where disability not caused by service must be relieved, the necessary legislation in State legislatures to establish proper homes or retreats for the very exceptional cases of those soldiers who, through no vicious habits, but by misfortune or sickness have become unable to earn a living. And yet we ought solemnly to consider that no public movement is possible, based on a principle of ethics either much higher or far lower than the average moral standard of the citizen. Such is the intricacy of society that not only is it difficult to trace chains of cause and effect, but even the single link is often inscrutable. The lack of high principle in individuals undoubtedly lies at the foundation of immoral public action, but on the other hand popular movements powerfully influence private judgment. Hence remedies for both evils are essential, and with every suggestion for the organization of agitations there must be an appeal to the pure standard of personal morality which John Bright hoped might be the measure of state action. Here, therefore, is the great opportunity of the church. For one, I believe in political preaching, not to advocate partisan measures but to bring to every listener the most difficult lesson that emotional, intellectual, and practical morality are one and the same thing. The counting house, the polling booth, and the church have not different morals nor different theories. The history of progress has been a history of the separation of organs. The early king was legislative, judiciary, and executive all in one. Now we have a hundred thousand men to carry on all the nice divisions and subdivisions into which each of these functions is cut up. So also with the occupations of men. A single pioneer builds a whole house, is architect, carpenter, mason, plasterer, and what-not. In high civilization each man of the forty trades called into requisition by house-building can do but one small thing, and his capacities in every other direction suffer atrophy. And so in the intricacy of our modern lives we are often scru

pulously moral on one side, but find it, alas! most difficult to be moral all around; in our relations to the State as well as in our relations to persons like ourselves; in the fervor of religious emotion and in the reaction of commonplace trade or profession; in the quiet of well regulated private life and in the mad tumult of public business. Morality without the sanction of religion is, I believe, of doubtful possibility, but too often the charge is brought that what passes for religion is common enough without morality. If this reproach were taken home by the church, and the remedy found, the pension grab would find its place under the rubric of the moral law where it belongs. We would hear less said about law-abiding citizens like pensioners under a disability or service statute, and more about good men; less of legality and more of duty, less of economic socialism and more of personal exertion for ourselves and others.

Nothing which has been said above is intended to destroy the sentiment of gratitude for the soldier, or the moral obligation of any individual in this great nation, expressed in the immortal words of Lincoln's second inaugural.

With malice toward none, with charity for all ; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. But the words are: "who shall have borne the battle." The honor of such is magnified in the receipt of the country's ungrudged gifts, the honest pensioner is the stimulus to patriotism of the generations which grow up about his knees. Reverence and love are his due, for his example calls for imitation; and the assurance of ease in his declining years is the guarantee of similar self-sacrifice when danger again appears. Heroism and patience mark the loftiest type of character. Let those whose welfare has been secured by his suffering praise him in the gate and shower their benefactions upon him as far as may be consistent with his manhood. The nation has nothing but the tenderest interest in such as these. It is for the sake of his honor, to preserve unfading his hardearned laurels that we protest against the shame of legislation which in his name depletes our purse in the interest of pension brokers, and against the undiscriminating lavishness which draws no distinction between suffering heroes and those who should be content with the honor, which pales before no other, of having saved their country in the hour of her greatest need.

Wm. M. Sloane.

General Sherman said:

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:
'T was Burns, I believe, who said,

A chiel's amang ye, takin' notes,
And, faith, he 'll prent it.

Here I find myself among a hundred such who will print their notes with variations, and silence would better become me. Von Moltke has the press reputation of being silent in seven languages, yet on a visit some years ago I found him not only communicative on professional topics, but fluent on the subject of his experience in the Turkish service on the Tigris and Euphrates. The same was true of General Grant, who could be most congenial and fluent with boon companions, but as dumb as an oyster when a news reporter was announced.

Therefore, Mr. President, I ask of you the special privilege to speak on this occasion from notes, giving my own version of what I intend to say to your official reporter, to be printed or not as you may order.1

The toast assigned me is "The Old Army." Yes, that army is "old," older than the present government. It began to take form the moment the colonists made a lodgment on the coast of Massachusetts and Virginia; grew in proportion up to the French war of 1756, and still larger during the Revolutionary War, 17761783.

In 1783 the armies of the Revolution were all disbanded, except "eighty privates and a due proportion of officers, none to exceed the rank of captain," to garrison West Point and Fort Pitt.

In June, 1784, the Congress of the thirteen States provided for two companies of artillery and eight of infantry, not to exceed 37 officers and 700 enlisted men. In 1786 it increased the number to 46 officers and 840 men. At that date these troops garrisoned the frontier posts, viz.: Fort Harmar, now Marietta, Ohio, Vincennes, Indiana, and Venango, New York, in addition to West Point, Fort Pitt, and Springfield, Massachusetts. Then came 1789, with its new Constitution, and Washington be1 The General did not, however, read the notes, but

followed them from memory. The speech was not reported.

came its first chief executive. He was the father of this nation. No man ever better comprehended the meaning of the expression "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; that government was meant to "govern," not to be governed; that force to compel the right was as necessary as patriotism, industry, thrift, and patience to the citizen, and one of his first acts was to organize an army as the right hand of his administration of law and justice in the face of clamoring theorists. His efforts resulted in the formation of the present army of the United States.

Its first commander was Josiah Harmar; and the army was composed of a battalion of artillery commanded by Major John Doughty, and one regiment of infantry, of which Harmar was lieutenant-colonel, the whole numbering 46 officers and 840 men.

Before Washington had concluded his eight years of administration in 1797, he had by his influence with Congress raised this force to one general officer (James Wilkinson), two of the general staff, one corps of artillerists and engineers, two companies of light dragoons, and four regiments of infantry, aggregating 189 officers and 3158 men.

Were I to follow all the changes for a hundred years, I know that you gentlemen of the press would be more fatigued than when your mothers made you read the Book of Numbers. Let me, however, conclude this branch of my subject by stating that at the end of the last century the old army was composed of 2347 officers and men; that the pay of a lieutenant-colonel was $50 a month; a major $45; a captain $35; a lieutenant $26; and a cornet $20; that a sergeant's pay was $6 a month; a corporal's $5; and a private's $4.

Nevertheless, in proportion to the population and wealth of our country, that small army exceeded in strength and cost the present regular army of to-day.

But it is not the numbers or pay which constitute an army, but the spirit which animates it. Every military expedition, great or small, demands many conditions—a clearly well-defined object or purpose to be accomplished, ample means, a leader with unbending will, confident of his strength and power, and followers obedient, loyal, and with intelligence

enough to understand the nature of the work to be done.

That little army possessed all these qualities, bequeathed to us lessons of inestimable value, and were in fact the pioneers of civilization on this continent. They fought the Shawnees and Ottawas in Ohio, Michigan, and Canada; the Cherokees and Creeks in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; the Comanches in Texas; the Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes on the plains; the Utes and Apaches in New Mexico and Arizona, and the Nez Percés in Oregon, without expectation of honor, reward, or profit; and I am sure Stanley learned here from personal experience and from reports much that was of great use to him in his three several expeditions into the heart of the dark continent of Africa. He now reports that in his recent expedition from the mouth of the Congo to Zanzibar he traveled from west to east, by river and land, 6032 miles to rescue the governor of Equatoria, who found himself cut off from his base (Egypt) by the death of Gordon and the reconquest of the Soudan by the fanatic Mahdi. Thirty thousand pounds sterling had been subscribed for his use in England, and Stanley had volunteered to go and rescue Emin Pasha, which he did at terrible sacrifice of life and money. He has recorded the tale well and truthfully, and I think that the man he went to save, who could not rescue his followers from the tight place in which he found himself, was not worth the cost. Stanley, however, did his part heroically; therefore all honor to him and his faithful associates; and I repeat that I am sure he had received in America inspiration from the examples of our old army during its history of the past hundred years. One or two of these, of which he must have known, I will briefly trace.

In 1803 Mr. Jefferson bought of Napoleon for fifteen millions of dollars the Upper and Lower Provinces of Louisiana, as little known then as are Unyoro and Uganda to-day. You young men of the press think you are smart and original, but if you will search the journals of that period you will find that for personal abuse and wit your predecessors were your equals if not your superiors. They poured on President Jefferson their choicest vocabulary, and said that he had bought "the great American Desert, fit only for Indians, buffalo, and rattlesnakes." "T is true these did then abound, but behold the result! The territory then acquired by purchase now comprises twelve States of our Union with unlimited minerals, pastoral and agricol esources, in fact is one of the great gr he world. ut in 1804 it was be Frenge of St. Louis wher , traders, and but for to last three,

four, or five years, often covering eight or ten thousand miles of travel. Mr. Jefferson desired to explore these regions to see what he had bought, and naturally turned to the little army of which he was the constitutional commanderin-chief. The first expedition fitted out was in 1804, that of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark, of the old army, with a detachment of soldiers, boatmen, and trappers with orders to ascend the Missouri River to its source, thence cross to the Columbia River, descend it to the Pacific Ocean, and return to St. Louis. There were no steamboats then, and for 1800 miles they had to pole, cordelle, and drag with towlines their bateaux against a current which steamboats now can hardly stem; then march afoot across the mountains, build new boats, and paddle down the Columbia. All was accomplished, and their report of what they saw and encountered is as true to-day as when it was written.

The next noted expedition was in 1805 by Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike, who ascended in like manner to the source of the Mississippi. On his return to St. Louis he was ordered up the Osage River to restore some fugitive Indians, and then go on to explore the Red River, which was the boundary line between Spanish territory and our new purchase. Mistaking the Arkansas for the Red River he followed it to its source, became bewildered among the snow-clad mountains, got back to the plains for game, then went south to the Sangre de Cristo Pass which he crossed to the head of the Rio Grande del Norte, called the "Colorado" or Red; built a fort when he found himself on the wrong Red River, was captured by Spanish troops, taken to Santa Fé, and afterward sent on to Chihuahua. His journals were taken from him, and he and his small party were sent back to Natchitoches, Louisiana, by way of Texas. His experiences were recorded and printed in 1810, and are most interesting, especially to us who can now travel the same route in palace cars where he suffered such privations. In the war of 1812, he was killed by the explosion of a magazine at Little York, now Toronto, Canada.

I might go on with similar tales, but must refer the curious to Washington Irving's "Astoria" and "Bonneville." It was not until 1842 that Captain Frémont, of the Topographical Engineers, began his systematic explorations of the transcontinental routes with adequate means and proper equipment, and since that day the government has caused every nook and crevice of that vast region, nearly a thousand miles north and south and two thousand east and west, to be explored. Four great railways have been built with numerous branches, so that you can buy a ticket here in