“Persons communicating with the Office, should remember this, and to insure a correct distribution of their mail, should, in all cases, indorse upon the outside of the envelope, the number of the claim referred to, the name of the claimant, and the nature of the claim.
“In this Division, claims are also prepared for the files, by having a heavy paper jacket placed round them, upon which is indorsed the Act under which it is filed, the description of the party claiming, their address, also the address of the attorney, if one appears in the claim.”
The Judicial Division is charged with an application of the law to the evidence, and the determining of the right of the applicant to the pension. This office is divided into three grand divisions—invalid, widows, and minors. The first embraces all claims preferred by surviving soldiers; the second, all claims based upon the service and death of soldiers and sailors; the third, those of minors.
An Examiner of Pensions does not sit upon a bed of roses—or, if he does, it is full of thorns. So various and minute are the provisions of law, applicable to the cases under his consideration, so numerous are the rulings of the office, and the decisions of the Heads of Departments, and of the Bureau, with the opinion of the Attorney-General added, all bearing upon this claim, it demands the most exhaustive examination, the keenest discrimination, and the most wise judgment, to reach a final just conclusion. And when his conclusion is reached, it is not final.
In the Judicial Division, are filed all pending claims. These files are arranged with reference to the initial letter of the soldier’s surname, and are divided into sections proportioned to the magnitude of the letter of the alphabet. Upon the receipt of jacketed claims from the mail division, the first step is to see if the party, making application, ever filed a claim before, and this is ascertained by examining the “original records.”
These records fill thirty enormous volumes, and contain three hundred and eighty-three thousand applications that have been filed under the act of July 14, 1862. All entries are made therein with reference to the first three letters of the soldier’s surname, and only by this subdivision of names, affording two thousand eight hundred combinations, can convenient reference to any given claim be had; and even when so divided, the examination of the greater combination requires considerable labor. For instance, in two hundred thousand entries under W. I. L., there will be three thousand two hundred and fifty entries; and under S. M. I. you will find two thousand seven hundred and fifty Smiths. If the result of this examination affords no evidence of a prior application by the same person, after noting all other applications based upon the service of the same soldier, the claims are numbered in numerical order and placed upon the record, which includes a full description thereof, and the recorded claims are then placed in the files, to await examination in the order of their receipt.
When they are reached, the examiner’s duties begin. He first searches for such recorded evidence as can be found in any of the Departments of the Government. From these he notes all omissions, and points unsupported, and calls upon the claimant, or his attorney, for corroborative evidence of the statements made in the declaration. He is guided in his requirements by the hundreds of rulings applicable to the smallest details of the various kinds of claims. All the evidence furnished in response must comply with the minutest demand of the law; the law of evidence as applied in courts, and the express requirements of the law under which the pension is claimed, are both brought to bear in the consideration of the points to be met, and the testimony offered in proof.
You will not be astonished to be told that very often they are not met, or that in thousands of just cases the testimony is unequal to the gradgrind requirements of the law. A want of a knowledge of the provisions of the law—more than of willful knavery—is the great acknowledged difficulty with which the Office has to contend. Many a poor sinner, who lost his leg or arm, or carries a bullet in him, received in his country’s battles, knows all about the minus members, the battles, and the bullet, and not an atom about “the provisions of the law,” or the inextricable windings of official red-tape. Because his knowledge is of so one-sided a character, he finds it no easy matter to get the governmental reward for that buried leg or arm; and by the time all “the requirements of the law” have been slowly beaten into his brains, the greater portion of his pension is pocketed by the claim-agent who showed him how to get it.
All these provisions and safeguards of the law are said to be necessary, to protect the Government against fraudulent claims. Perhaps they are; but that makes them no less hard, or ofttimes unjust “to the soldier and widow” who, in writing a letter, are as ignorant as babies of “the requirements of the law.” Under these requirements, and with the utter ignorance of common people of technical terms, and judicial statements, it is not strange that “a large percentage of the evidence offered, is imperfectly prepared.” A great deal more is deficient in substance, or suspected of fraud.
The correspondence from this Division, stating objections, requiring further proof, and elucidating doubtful points, amounts to hundreds of letters a day. The long delay inevitable, is said to be the fault of the system. “Ex-parte evidence is the criminal.” “Were means afforded for a cross-examination of all applicants and witnesses, these difficulties and delays would disappear. One-half of the amount now taken from the pockets of pensioners, to compensate agents for procuring their pensions, would pay the entire cost of such a system, to say nothing of the thousands of dollars paid from the Treasury upon fraudulent claims, that would be saved.”