If this report is accepted as reliable, it should of course lead to the rejection of the claim for pension on the part of Mr. Carroll.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, July 6, 1886.

To the House of Representatives: 

I herewith return without approval House bill No. 3043, entitled “An act granting a pension to Lewis W. Scanland.”

The claimant filed his declaration for a pension in 1884, alleging that he contracted chronic diarrhea while serving in a company of mounted Illinois volunteers in the Black Hawk War.

The records show that he served from April 18, 1832, to May 28, in the same year.

He was examined by a board of surgeons in 1884, when he was said to be 75 years old.  In his examination he did not claim to have diarrhea for a good many years.  On the contrary, he claimed to be affected with constipation, and said he had never had diarrhea of late years, except at times when he had taken medicine for constipation.

I am inclined to think it would have been a fortunate thing if in this case it could have been demonstrated that a man could thrive so well with the chronic diarrhea for fifty-two years as its existence in the case of this good old gentleman would prove.  We should then, perhaps, have less of it in claims for pensions.

The fact is, in this case there is no disability which can be traced to the forty days’ military service of fifty-four years ago, and I think little, if any, more infirmity than is usually found in men of the age of the claimant.

Entertaining this belief, I am constrained to withhold my signature from this bill.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, July 6, 1886.

To the House of Representatives: 

I return herewith without approval House bill No. 5414, entitled “An act granting a pension to Maria Cunningham.”

The husband of the beneficiary named in this bill enlisted January 29, 1862, and was discharged January 20, 1865.

He applied for a pension in 1876, alleging a shell wound in the head.  His claim was rejected on the ground that there appeared to be no disability from that cause.  No other injury or disability was ever claimed by him, but at the time of his examination in 1876 he was found to be sickly, feeble, and emaciated, and suffering from an advanced stage of saccharine diabetes.

His widow filed an application for a pension in 1879, alleging that her husband died in December, 1877, of spinal disease and diabetes, contracted in the service.

Her claim was rejected because evidence was not furnished that the cause of the soldier’s death had its origin in the military service.

There seems to be an entire absence of proof of this important fact.

GROVER CLEVELAND.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, July 6, 1886.

To the House of Representatives: