When our opponents speak of “encroachments” by the Executive upon the authority of Congress or the Judiciary, apparently the act they ordinarily have in view is Pension Order No. 78, issued under the authority of existing law. This order directed that hereafter any veteran of the Civil War who had reached the age of sixty-two should be presumptively entitled to the pension of six dollars a month, given under the dependent pension law to those whose capacity to earn their livelihood by manual labor has been decreased fifty per cent, and that by the time the age of seventy was reached the presumption should be that the physical disability was complete; the age being treated as an evidential fact in each case. This order was made in the performance of a duty imposed upon the President by an act of Congress, which requires the Executive to make regulations to govern the subordinates of the Pension Office in determining who are entitled to pensions. President Cleveland had already exercised this power by a regulation which declared that seventy-five should be set as the age at which total disability should be conclusively presumed. Similarly, President McKinley established sixty-five as the age at which half disability should be conclusively presumed. The regulation now in question, in the exercise of the same power, supplemented these regulations made under Presidents Cleveland and McKinley. The men who fought for union and for liberty in the years from 1861 to 1865 not only saved this Nation from ruin, but rendered an inestimable service to all mankind. We of the United States owe the fact that to-day we have a country to what they did; and the Nation has decreed by law that no one of them, if disabled from earning his own living, shall lack the pension to which he is entitled, not only as a matter of gratitude, but as a matter of justice. It is the policy of the Republican party, steadily continued through many years, to treat the veterans of the Civil War in a spirit of broad liberality. The order in question carried out this policy, and is justified not merely on legal grounds, but also on grounds of public morality. It is a matter of common knowledge that when the average man who depends for his wages upon bodily labor has reached the age of sixty-two his earning ability is in all probability less by half than it was when he was in his prime; and that by the time he has reached the age of seventy he has probably lost all earning ability. If there is doubt upon this point let the doubter examine the employees doing manual labor in any great manufactory or any great railroad, and find out how large is the proportion of men between the ages of sixty-two and seventy, and whether these men are still employed at the highly paid tasks which they did in their prime. As a matter of fact, many railroads pension their employees when they have reached these ages, and in nations where old-age pensions prevail they always begin somewhere between the two