the hardships of our most bloody and arduous campaigns are now disabled from diseases that had a real but not traceable origin in the service I do not doubt.  Besides these there is another class composed of men many of whom served an enlistment of three full years and of reenlisted veterans who added a fourth year of service, who escaped the casualties of battle and the assaults of disease, who were always ready for any detail, who were in every battle line of their command, and were mustered out in sound health, and have since the close of the war, while fighting with the same indomitable and independent spirit the contests of civil life, been overcome by disease or casualty.

I am not unaware that the pension roll already involves a very large annual expenditure; neither am I deterred by that fact from recommending that Congress grant a pension to such honorably discharged soldiers and sailors of the Civil War as, having rendered substantial service during the war, are now dependent upon their own labor for a maintenance and by disease or casualty are incapacitated from earning it.  Many of the men who would be included in this form of relief are now dependent upon public aid, and it does not, in my judgment, consist with the national honor that they shall continue to subsist upon the local relief given indiscriminately to paupers instead of upon the special and generous provision of the nation they served so gallantly and unselfishly.  Our people will, I am sure, very generally approve such legislation.  And I am equally sure that the survivors of the Union Army and Navy will feel a grateful sense of relief when this worthy and suffering class of their comrades is fairly cared for.

There are some manifest inequalities in the existing law that should be remedied.  To some of these the Secretary of the Interior has called attention.

It is gratifying to be able to state that by the adoption of new and better methods in the War Department the calls of the Pension Office for information as to the military and hospital records of pension claimants are now promptly answered and the injurious and vexatious delays that have heretofore occurred are entirely avoided.  This will greatly facilitate the adjustment of all pending claims.

The advent of four new States—­South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington—­into the Union under the Constitution in the same month, and the admission of their duly chosen representatives to our National Congress at the same session, is an event as unexampled as it is interesting.