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VARIOUS trains of argument have been used to justify the indiscriminate and lavish distribution of pensions in which the national government has lately been indulging. Every intelligent man who is not blinded by partisanship apprehends the true cause -- a determination to be rid of the Treasury surplus in any way productive of political results, and therefore under the guise of patriotic gratitude to secure the vote of the soldiers in the late war with it. But so adroit is the reasoning of those who seek political benefit therefrom that they not only deceive others but even themselves by sophistries which cannot too often be exposed. The present, the immediate future, and the times of posterity may be influenced by them and a bias given to other matters with even more disastrous results.

We are told that the state owes a debt to those who have endangered their lives in its service, and that the payment of pensions is an obligation like that incurred by contract. (1) Every one admits the obligation, but the ground of it is a sense of gratitude which establishes no right for those who have served and suffered. Viewed from any standpoint there is no department of the public service more glorious than that of the coast guard or life-saving patrol. Every station along the shore bids defiance to the elements. Restless and treacherous ocean, stormy winds, and blackest night combine against the seafarer. But the surf-boatmen sometimes baffle them all and bring safe to land tens upon tens and hundreds upon hundreds of human beings with precious lives. The personal risk of every member of every crew is extreme; exposure produces disease and brings on premature old age. The whole character of the work demands the utmost devotion, and not only subjects the men to intellectual and physical strain but jeopardizes their lives. And yet their pay is a pittance, the pay of the day laborer; neither individually nor corporately do they demand a money reward from the rescued and government grants only temporary pensions. He who saves lives has simply done his duty, and in private life would be regarded as a monster if he demanded all or any of the wealth of those whose lives had been spared through his agency.

On the other hand gratitude is expected from the rescued, and if he does not show it men mark him down as less than human. And gratitude is shown by some return, but not one commensurate with ability, for that would be compensation and destroy gratitude, which rests on a sense of obligation and honor. Hence even if the state were not the sovereign which it is, daily bestowing on the man benefits which he can only acknowledge but never requite, still the ground of its obligation to surviving soldiers and the families of those who died would be gratitude, and gratitude measured by the personal good will of its citizens.

And speaking of the sovereignty of the State we come to the legal aspect of this question of debt. The field is too large for extended discussion. It is believed that there is absolutely no precedent for the contention seriously made by so many advocates of the present pension system, that the claim of the soldier for support is a legal claim like any other presented for services rendered. The powers of the judiciary under which the individual seeks redress from the State are all granted by one of the parties concerned, to wit, the political sovereign, and limited to such pleas as deal with unfulfilled obligations laid upon the political corporation by its members. Local governments are responsible for the condition of roads and the proper lighting of streets, for sanitary conditions in certain instances, and can be sued for failure to perform their duty, the damages to be commensurate with the loss. But such governments were created for that purpose and lay taxes expressly to fulfil it. Was it ever conceived, however, that a house-holder should have the right to demand damages for the silver stolen by a burglar, the theft being possible by reason of inefficient police supervision? Could his family, if he were murdered in defense of his property, demand a pension of the state for their support? And the theory becomes the more absurd when it is urged that the soldiers who were once in arms saved the Union, that in so doing they preserved for us all that we have and all that we enjoy, and that therefore we are niggards when we refuse to share and share alike on the ground of a technicality in the laws which justice demands should be remedied by statute. The truth is that man as a social and political being incapable of either physical or spiritual welfare without the state has therefore a double character. On one hand his personality, his manhood, his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be his first concern. On the other hand all these come to him only in organized society; and in the necessary sacrifices, even to the risk of life, which he has to make for it under the safeguards of constitutional government he is merely performing an act of enlightened selfishness. Whatever obligation is incurred is one with the conditions of his existence in the personality which is everything to himself, which is in fact himself. In this way he is the state in a truer sense than that in which Louis XIV used the phrase.