American War Pensions Another financial dispute in the United States
is concerned with a vastly larger sum than the £5,000,000 proposed for unemployment relief. There is a strong possibility that provision will be made for the ex-Service men in the War, which will cost so much that Mr. Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury, has said that it would disarrange the country's financial structure, would ruin the bond market, would automatically destroy capital values running into hundreds of millions of dollars, and would be the equivalent of a capital levy on the holders of all American Government securities. The effect, he believes, would be felt not only in the United States, but all over the world. It would be a dreadful irony if politics in the United States caused the question of War pensions to create on a much vaster scale the scandalous burden of the pensioners of the Civil War.
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