BOOKS.
WAR PENSIONS.*
lunar PARRY and General Codrington have written a most valuable little book on the past and present administration of war pensions. It is only too well known that this branch of our public service is, and has always been, moat unsatisfactory.
• war Pension*: Pia and Present. By Judge Peru and LtoutenanVieneral Ste A, E. Costrtagton. London : Nisbet. Hs. new The Royal Patriotic Fund of 1854, the-story of which the authors rehearse briefly, was the perfect type of lethargic and soulless bureaucracy, against which the Press for two generations thundered in vain. Its successors, the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation of 1903, the Statutory Committee of 1915, and the Ministry of Pensions of 1916, have each in turn brought a little improvement. But the unhappy traditions of inefficiency and =fairness still cling to our pensions administrators, and have already earned for the new Ministry that bad pre-eminence as a Circumlocution Office which before the war was assigned by common consent to the Local Government Board. It is more important to ascertain the causes of this phenomenon than to abuse the individuals nominally responsible. Judge Parry and General Codrington detect the true reason, we think, in the fact that a disabled soldier has no statutory right to a pension, and therefore cannot appeal to an independent Tribunal against the award made by the Department in his case. The wounded soldier's pension is fixed under a Royal Warrant ; it is techni- cally a matter of Royal bounty, not of legal right, and the Courts cannot be asked to say whether, in a given case, it is adequate or not, any more than they can help an aggrieved soldier to recover arrears of pay. The sailor is probably in a better position. Naval pensions are paid by virtue of an Act of 1885, according to a scale promulgated from time to time in art Order in Council, and it is at least conceivable that an aggrieved naval pensioner might bring an action against the Admiralty or the Ministry of Pensions under the statute. The disabled soldier, however, has no legal remedy against an unjust decision of the pension authorities. The Ministry is irresponsible to the law. But irresponsibility is the medium in which the Red- Tape microbe flourishes most luxuriantly. Until we give the pensioner a legal status, with a right of appeal to the Courts, we may expect Tite Barnacle and his clan to dominate the Ministry of Pensions, just as they controlled the Royal Patriotic Fund, and to create widespread discontent.
The authors have no political axes to grind, nor do they speak without authority-. Judge Parry was the President, and General Codrington a member, of the Pensions AppealTribunal which was set up by Mr. Barnes in the summer of 1917 and abolished by Mr. Hodge a year later. The Tribunal was appointed, in pursuance of a pledge extorted from the Government by its critics in the House, to hear and determine appeals from disabled sailors and soldiers whose " medical unfitness " was, in their own opinion, but not in that of the Ministry, "attributable to, or aggravated by," military service. Tho Tribunal sat not only in London but also in the great cities of the North and in Scotland and Ireland, and it dealt with over nine hundred cases ill the year. Nearly half the book is filled with typical judgments selected from the mass to illustrate the nature of the work clone by Judge Parry and his colleagues. It is not too much to say that these judicial statements of fact form a most damaging indictment of the system under which pensions are awarded to the disabled soldiers. As the Select Committee on National Expenditure has pointed out, the Ministry makes its award on the report of the Medical Board—usually a single physician or surgeon—on whose recommendation the disabled soldier has been discharged. The Medical Board has to report whether the man's disability is due to, or has been aggravated by, military service. But all that the Medical Board knows about the man when he entered the Army is derived from the report of the Admission Board—often a single medical officer—which examined him hastily on enlistment, and had never seen nor heard of him before. Inexpert clerks in the Ministry decide whether the Medical Board's report is to be accepted without inquiry or referred to a specialist. At no stage In the proceedings is the man's own evidence carefully recorded; no reference is made to his civilian doctor, his employer, or his benefit society. The Medical Board may describe accurately the soldier's physical condition on discharge, but it cannot say, in many oases, whether his disability is due to, or aggravated by, military service. because it does not know, and is not expected to find out, the real state of the man's health before he enlisted. One might suppose, judging from the number of thoroughly unfit men whom some particularly ruthless or incompetent Admission Boards passed into the Army as Al, that Medical Boards depend- ing on the evidence of such offioere would r000mmond nearly every case of disability as pensionable. On the contrary, the system is worked so that the unhappy man who ought not to have been passed by the Admission Board, and whose indifferent health hen been ruined by a few months of hardship,Is often made
to suffer on discharge as well, by being refused his pension. Numerous ewes of the kind are recorded by the authors.
When Judge Parry's Tribunal began to sit, and had overcome the natural unwillingness of the Ministerial staff to facilitate its inquiries, it soon found that many of the decisions appealed against were wrong because they were based on insufficient or inaccurate evidence. A physician and a surgeon of the highest repute were members of the Tribunal, and examined the disabled appellant whenever there was need to do so. The man gave evidence, and could cite the evidence of his employer, his doctor, his club secretary, and others who had known him in civil life. An official from the Ministry of Pensions who was present was asked to explain the reasons why the pension had been refused or cut down. The Tribunal, in fact, tried to discover the whole truth about each case ; it then had no difficulty in arriving at a just decision. After a few menthe, the Local Pension Committees were asked to make inquiries into appealed eases, for the guidance of the Ministry. Many appeals, it was soon found, were settled by the Ministry when it saw that its Medical Boards had been careless or misinformed. The good influence of the Tribunal thus extended far beyond the nine hundred cases which it actually heard and decided. The stimu- lus given to the Local Committees, which nee4 strengthening to counterbalance the excessive centralization of the Ministry, was in itself beneficent. The discontent among the disabled men was checked as soon as it became apparent that an irre- sponsible clerk, juggling with misleading papers, could no longer fling a broken man penniless on the world without the possibility of appeal. But the Tribunal has come to an end, and there is no guarantee against the revival of these deplorable and con- temptible abuses. Nor will there be until the disabled soldier is accorded an incontestable statutory right to his pension, an that he may carry his grievance to the County Court, and further if necessary, to obtain a judicial inquiry and a judicial decision. As the authors remind us in their closing chapter, America is far ahead of us in this matter, except perhaps in regard to the Local Pension Committees, which she has not yet tried. It is unfortunately true that American politicians turned to bass uses the general desire that war veterans or their widows and children should be kept out of want. and that Congress passed many minor Pension Bills which were designed to buy votes for the party in power. But the actual pensions administration has been brought to a high state of efficiency. The Pensions Bureau at Washington is a model Department:- " The fact that a man has certain well-defined rights, and that these are ascertained in accordance with regulated procedure by trained authorities from whom there are definite rights of appeal, gives much public eatisfaction and leaves no legitimate grievance in the minds of those whose claims are denied as not being within the terms of the law."
We wish that this could be said of our own Ministry of Pensions There ie unrest enough in the country without adding to it the legitimate discontent of thousands of officers and men who, having spent themselves in the war, are deprived of their well-earned pensions by Departmental thoughtlessness and incompetence.
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