EXECUTIVE MANSION, _May 28, 1886_.
_To the House of Representatives_:
I return without approval a bill originating in the House of
Representatives, numbered 2145, and entitled "An act for the relief of
Rebecca Eldridge."
This bill provides for the payment of a pension to the claimant as the
widow of Wilber H. Eldridge, who was mustered into the service on the
24th day of July, 1862, and discharged June 21, 1865. He was pensioned
at the rate of $2 per month for a slight wound in the calf of the left
leg, received on the 25th day of March, 1865. There is no pretense that
this wound was at all serious, and a surgeon who examined it in 1880
reported that in his opinion the wounded man "was not incapacitated from
obtaining his subsistence by manual labor;" that the ball passed "rather
superficially through the muscles," and that the party examined said
there was no lameness "unless after long standing or walking a good
deal."
On the 28th of January, 1881, while working about a building, he fell
backward from a ladder and fractured his skull, from which he died the
same day.
Without a particle of proof and with no fact established which connects
the fatal accident in the remotest degree with the wound referred to, it
is proposed to grant a pension to the widow of $12 per month.
It is not a pleasant thing to interfere in such a case; but we are
dealing with pensions, and not with gratuities.