After serving his time there, he posed as a neglected old soldier and succeeded in obtaining letters from sympathetic Congressmen commending his case to the attention of the pension office, but without avail until the Act of 1890 was passed.

He then put in a claim which was twice rejected by the pension office examiners, but each time the decision was overruled, and in the end he was put upon the pension roll.

This case is only one of many made possible by lax methods of investigating pension claims.

Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire eventually said of the effect of pension policy, as shaped by his own party with his own aid: "If there was any soldier on the Union side during the Civil War who was not a good soldier, who has not received a pension, I do not know who he is.

He can always find men of his own type, equally poor soldiers who would swear that they knew he had been in a hospital at a certain time, whether he was or not--the records did not state it, but they knew it was so--and who would also swear that they knew he had received a shock which affected his hearing during a certain battle, or that something else had happened to him; and so all those pension claims, many of which are worthless, have been allowed by the Government, because they were 'proved.'" * June 27, 1890.
The increase in the expenditure for pensions, which rose from $88,000,000 in 1889 to $159,000,000 in 1893, swept away much of the surplus in the Treasury.