and he saw that she could not swim. He jumped in and pulled her out and slipped back in and drowned himself, and his wife comes along and asks for a pension. It is just an illustration. His commanding officer, after this has all been done, appointed a board to investigate how this man was drowned. The board comes out and finds out, after taking the evidence, that he saw this little child about to drown and he jumped into the water and he drowned himself, and they make a report that he was killed in line of duty while

then in the service.

That is what I would like to see, of course, but then when the War Department makes its report it says that this man was not actually in the line of duty, although he was in the service, and the Bureau of Pensions is compelled to abide by that and can not go behind it. The difference between "military" duty and "line of duty" is where they draw a distinguishing line. A man has to carry a gun or be killed in battle by the enemy if he is in "line of military duty." Of course, if that fellow had not saved the little girl he ought to have been court-martialed. I say that we ought to be able to get behind such a law as that.

Those are two things that are making you boys and your dependent ones more trouble than any two other things on the pension statutes to-day, but they are laws. It is up to you to get behind your Congressman and help yourselves.

Now, another proposition-I don't want to talk too long; whenever you get tired say so

VOICES. Go ahead, go ahead.

Commissioner SCOTT. Your widows, in my judgment, are entitled to the same consideration as the widows of any other war [applause] or the dependent children of any other war; your dependent children are entitled to the same consideration from the Government of the United States as the dependent children of any other war. [Applause.] I am not saying by that now that the dependent widows and children of the last war are receiving any too much consideration from the Government, but I am saying that the widows and children from the last war and the widows of the Spanish War are not receiving the same consideration, and they ought to receive it. [Applause.] If you and your widows and orphans received the same consideration as the widows and orphans of the last war, why is it that you widow gets $20 a month and the widow in the other war gets $30! If a soldier of the last war dies, his widow gets $30 a month. Why the discrimination? If you have a dependent child and you die and leave a dependent child under 16 years of age, your dependent child gets $4 a month; if a soldier of the last war dies and leaves a dependent child of the same age, he gets $10 a month. Does it cost any less to maintain a child dependent of a soldier of the Spanish-American War than it does to maintain a child dependent of a soldier of the last war?

VOICES. No, no, no.

Commissioner SCOTT. Here is an inequality, and these things ought to be corrected. Congress is a reasonable body, and if you establish the proper liaison between Congress and the White House and leave the impressions properly before them, they will see your point very quickly. The trouble is, gentlemen, that we have some few Congressmen and Senators who are nothing but a lot of timeservers. If they

all got down to work and looked the pension law over and if they all got down to work and worked just like the Pension Commissioner of the United States has to work, they would soon see the inequalities and I am sure that the mistakes would be rectified.

I am for a uniform pension law, if you please. [Applause.] I would like to explain a few of the organizations of the department to show what we are up against.

I tried to establish, at your commander in chief's solicitation and request, a little bureau over here for the dissemination of information. I don't know how well it worked. I got there occasionally and I asked the man I put in charge if everything was working all right and he said it was and that he was giving out considerable information. I want you to have the information because I want to help you and, when you feel dissatisfied, when you don't like any action taken in the Bureau of Pensions, all you have to do is address a communication to the Bureau of Pensions, Department of the Interior, and it will receive attention, but if you want the commissioner himself, put on that "For the personal attention of the commissioner" or "Winfield Scott, personal," and I will get it. [Applause.] I am telling you what to tell your comrades. Don't make me too much work, because I will go through with it as long as I last. I have a good private secretary who stands ready to help me all the time, and if it is necessary I will get four or five more. We will give you prompt replies to your inquiries within 24 hours. We will give you some information in some way.

We have 823 employees in the Bureau of Pensions, and of course they are all supposed to be highly technical people under the civil service. And the only thing I can do is to make them keep regular hours and do some work. If I want to get rid of a civil-service employee I have to prefer charges against him and he has a hearing before the Civil Service Commission. You boys, some of you, know what it is because you are civil-service employees.

When I took possession of the office of Commissioner of Pensions, I found about 91 ex-service men in the bureau and about 825 or 830 employees who had never served in any campaign. The question of sympathy has been almost eliminated from the bureau among the clerks because of the way they came there under the classified civil service. That is one thing that struck me very forcibly, that there were not more of the soldiers themselves in the employ of the Government where they could give the proper attention to the comrades. I do not know why it is, whether it is because you did not apply for the job or not. Years ago when the Civil War veterans were young, they came into the service, and one of the greatest handicaps that I have in the Pension Bureau now is the old employee who is 65 years old. They ought to have a retirement law that would retire these men at 65 years of age. I could improve the efficiency of the Pension Bureau at least 25 per cent within three months if I could retire these men. So you can rest assured you will do your Commissioner of Pensions a favor if you will insist on your Congress this winter passing a proper retirement law and releasing these old men and women of 65. I think when I am 65 years old I ought to be chloroformed.

Now we pass on and write each day on an average of 25,000 letters in the Bureau of Pensions; 25,000 pieces of mail pass out of the Pension Bureau daily. Please understand that it is impossible for the Commissioner of Pensions to attach his personal signature to each one of those pieces of mail. I can not do it. That is why you get rubber stamps. I can not see and analyze each piece of mail that goes out or each letter that is written. The only thing I can do is to exercise supervision and do as my judgment dictates.

We send out 525,000 checks to pensioners and widows. I could not sign these checks. If I wanted to there would be no physical way to do it. They are signed by disbursing clerks and by the aid of machines that sign 15 or 20 at one time, with one pen, and several of these disbursing clerks are on the job, and we aim to get these checks out to the different parts of the United States so that you will receive them the 4th day of each month, and I have not heard of any complaint, so I guess they reach you on time. [Applause.]

I would like to give you a lot of data but I won't tire you, but I wish you would understand this: In July, this year, I signed for the Spanish War veterans alone 2,397 certificates. Those are always signed by my own personal signature. I signed for you 270 certificates for widows, so you are not all living who were living in the month of August. In August I signed about 241 new certificatesin other words, I put that many more of you on the roll. Many of these claims had been lying there at least a year, unacted on, and I tried to speed up the work a little and signed 268 certificates for widows. In September, up to and including the 25th day, I signed for you on that day 3,036 new certificates, and I suppose it will exceed 4,000 when I get back home. I also signed in that month, up to that day, 208 certificates for your widows.

On top of that I gave the Grand Army of the Republic 2,070 in July, in August 2,147, and up to September 25 1,524, a total of certificates signed for July of 6,596, August 8,335, and up to the 25th of September 6,652.

I signed these all personally because I want to know what the output of the bureau is. These outputs are 25 to 30 per cent higher than they were a year ago for the same month, and much higher than they were two years ago, and with a less force in the Bureau of Pensions than they had a year ago and a much less force than they had two years ago. [Applause.] Each week I have reports made up to show what work is done. The commissioner has to be on the job all the time or he don't know-well, we might as well be frank and understand this thing. In the last 10 or 12 years we have had an estimable old gentleman for Commissioner of Pensions, many of them, and they were unable to watch the detail and it has been the cause for a great deal of trouble, and that caused the lack of efficiency.

During the week ending September 19 I issued a total of 1,905 certificates, which means, in plain English, an adjudication of 1,905 lawsuits. Now, that is what we are doing for you in the Pension Bureau, and I venture to say if you write a letter to the Veterans' Bureau you will possibly receive a reply somewhere in three months, but I believe that you will receive a prompt reply to any letter that

you send to the Bureau of Pensions; anyway, I can assure you, you will get a reply within three or four days.

Now, for the War of the Revolution, we have paid out $70,000,000 in pensions. For the War of 1812 we paid out $46,156,595.39; for the Indian wars we have paid out to this date $27,917,099.30; for the Mexican War, $57,127,804.07; the Civil War between the States, which has been the most expensive war of history, we have paid out in pensions alone the stupendous sum of $6,643,042,017.30. For the war with Spain, our own war, we have paid out $156,381,705.07. I can say that we have paid out up to the 25th day of this month a total sum of $7,088,799,629.81, so it cost some money to have our wars, besides the loss and grief we have had in all that time, but that old Starry Banner is waving and it will always wave and will carry America's traditions throughout the world. [Applause.]

The pension roll of the Civil War is gradually dying out. I will give you figures on those so that you will understand, if I can find my data.

On the 31st day of August-that is the last I have tabulated--I understand there were 123,805 pensioners of the Civil war on the rolls. We are losing from the Civil War pensioners on each month about 2,000 pensioners. About that many are dying. At the end of this fiscal year we estimate the pension roll of the Civil War will be less than 100,000. It was at one time almost a million.

However, from our papers, we have indications that in 1950 we will have quite a straggling of the old soldiers still on the rolls.

The widows of the Civil War are dying out also. By the changes that have been made recently we can expect that the widows will decrease about 2,000 a month. There are now on the rolls 240,975, so there are a few more of them than there are of the old soldiers.

Coming up to the war with Spain, when I went in the Pension Bureau there were about 96,000 of my comrades on the roll, and up to and including the month of August-because we have not tabulated after that-we have in the month of August 105,231 Spanish War veterans.

Now, we have 105,231 Spanish War veterans on the rolls on August 31. You have on your rolls-that is where your duty comes inonly 69,730, according to your own commander in chief. Why should you not have all of this 105,000 men on your roll for the moral effect it might have on some people if for nothing at all? You should have every pensioner on your roll as members of your organization. You have got a possible roll of 275,000. We mobilized about 400,000 men in round numbers in the Spanish-American War. You ought to have them on the roll now, 27 years after the war. There is no reason for you not having it, and, if you, my comrades here to-dav, will go back home, you can help Carmi Thompson increase that roll [applause] from 69,000 to 260,000 next year.

And so, my comrades, as I stand here my one thought is that you will get all of your comrades on the roll and have them back of you in all that you are trying to do. And don't forget the auxiliary, Because when you have the women with you, as Senator Bursum said this morning, you have a strong moral force, and they, don't forget, have a vote, and their vote will help you just as much as your own will. Then you can go to your Pension Committee and to your

Congressman and say, we have so many hundred thousand people behind us and we want help and we are going to get it. That is what we have to do. It is up to you. There is no reasonable excuse for only just a few being on the rolls of this great organization, and une only possible thing left for you to do now is to go out and get these men on the job. If they understood it was a duty that they owed to themselves and to their fellow comrades, they would do it, I am

sure.

I am getting pretty tired. I would like to read you a lot of statistics that I have here this afternoon, but I know that we haven't got the time. I like St. Petersburg the same way that you fellows do, but I don't like their weather. [Applause.]

But I want to tell you this, as long as I am your commissioner if you get your troubles to me personally I will try to help you. I am giving you the situation just as it is.

I will tell you another thing I have done since the 1st of July. If a finding is made that a man's status-his pension status-should be reduced from what it is, I have made a ruling that before that recommendation of the board goes through, all the papers must be sent to the commissioner's desk for his personal attention. I have had claims piled up on my desk that high. [Applause.] I don't have much trouble of disposing of them. It don't take me nearly as long to go over those claims as a board does, for the first thing I do is to turn to the War Department's report and see what they say and then to the medical examination and see what that says, and if they issued another medical examination report I find out what they did and the upshot is I usually put a red pencil mark on saying, "You will allow this pension in the amount that the board in the field says it should be allowed for."

Then I call my chief of the division in there. I call them in, for instance, on the 1st of July, one after another, and then I had all of my chiefs in at one time and I told them that there is no ring in this bureau except the commissioner. I told them that the commissioner was going to run it. I said to them, "If you can't cooperate with me and fit into my plan of working then you can let me have your resignations." [Applause.] There seems to be every intention now on the part of all of my division heads to cooperate with me and I don't think there will be any resignations and I don't think you veterans will have to worry about what the Bureau of Pensions is going to do for you. We will be just as liberal as the law will permit us to be.

I want to be with you next year wherever you are and when I do meet with you I hope to have you tell me that Carmi Thompson and the legislative committee have gotten a bill through Congress which I know he is going to get through. [Applause.]

Commander in Chief HERRICK. I want to introduce to you Mr. James E. Coad executive vice president of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce. Comrades, you have all been soldiers and you know that there are several lines of defense, and also an offensive warfare. Since you have been here you have met the shock troops under the command of Jack O'Connor and they have been showing you a wonderful time, but away back, behind the shock troops and

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