Mr. SUMMERS. No; I believe not, because when the boys once have the bonds many of them would hold on to them. Others might transfer one or two or three of these bonds, you understand, to take care of present conditions.

Mr. GARNER. I have noticed you have attended nearly all of these hearings.

Mr. SUMMERS. I have a part of the time.

Mr. GARNER. You probably have observed that the principal plea for the bonus at this time is for ready cash to rehabilitate the soldier and enable him to get a new start in life. The testimony up to date has indicated that if we issued bonds a large portion of the recipients would sell them immediately or hypothecate them for the purpose of borrowing money to do this, that, or the other thing, and it seems to me to be the preponderence of opinion among the men themselves that they want the cash.

Mr. SUMMERS. Yes.

Mr. GARNER. Do you believe the men would be satisfied with a bond that they had to go into the market and sell for 75 or 80 cents on the dollar? Would they not have the right to say that "Congress has recognized our right to this much money, and you have given me a piece of paper under which I get three-fourths of what you owe me, now I want the other fourth "?

Mr. SUMMERS. In the first place, I do not believe they would have to sell them at 75 or 80 cents on the dollar, but in this I recognize the ex-service man's right to a $50 bond a month. I have not said whether it was $50 cash, or anything about that, but it would amount to practically that in this case, because if my son, for instance, should receive a bond, it is quite possible that father would take that bond over, if the boy had to have the money to go ahead with his schooling. Mr. GARNER. Suppose my son is given a bond and wishes to obtain money, and I am not able to advance it. The boy goes into the market and gets 75 cents on the dollar for it; is he not going to say, "You owe me 25 cents more on that, because you have recognized the fact that you owe me $50 a month, and the effect is that you have not paid but 75 per cent of it, and I want you to pay the other 25 "? The CHAIRMAN. Why should we expect these bonds to sell at a depreciated value? These gentlemen want us to believe that a bond issued by this Government is going to sell at a very greatly depreciated value, and there is no occasion for any such alarm. Of course, they are entitled to their opinion.

Mr. TREADWAY. But let me interject there for a moment. We are all entitled to our opinion, as you say, and these bonds that Mr. Summers is providing for are 4 per cent bonds, and the going rate is 41 and 42. Those bonds are to-day selling at 90 or in that neighborhood.

Mr. HAWLEY. Those are taxed bonds?

Mr. TREADWAY. They are no more taxed in the hands of those men than these would be; not a bit. There is an exemption for every one of them.

The CHAIRMAN. Let us stop our argument in regard to this and let the gentleman be heard, so that we can hear the Treasury officials. Mr. TREADWAY. I want to know why, Mr. Summers, these bonds would not be depreciated?

Mr. SUMMERS. I maintain they would not drop to 75 or 80.

Mr. TREADWAY. I am not saying what they would drop to, but will they go below par?

Mr. SUMMERS. They may go a little below par, but I believe that with these bonds in the hands of 4,000,000 of men, whenever any one of the service men wants to transfer one, two, or three of these bonds, he has the disposition of them, that he will transfer them in a way that he will not have to make a great sacrifice. He may trade them for farm machinery, or he may trade them for a horse or for household goods, or, as I say, father, brother, or somebody else may take care of them.

Mr. TREADWAY. Let us follow out that farm suggestion, which is a very practical one. Suppose the boy wanted to secure some farm machinery. He goes to a dealer in farm machinery in his neighborhood and says, "Here, I have got this bond, what is your price on a rake or hoe or plow?" Will not the man selling that machinery as a commercial transaction make the price on that property that he has for sale, with due allowance for the depreciation of the market value of the bond which he is going to take as cash? The storekeeper is not going to be patriotic enough to stand any depreciation.

The CHAIRMAN. That we can not tell until the transaction is made.

Mr. SUMMERS. I do not believe that would be the thing that would occur, at least not out in my part of the country.

Mr. TREADWAY. But what about the Yankee merchant? The CHAIRMAN. The Yankee is going to look out for himself, and he will do it, and the Yankee is the man that is asking for assistance from the merchant right now.

Mr. KITCHIN. Mr. Summers, do you not realize or appreciate that the soldier who has fought our battles and been patriotic enough to come to the rescue of the Government in time of war, should have that same patriotism to serve the Government in time of peace, and if he realized that a bonus of $2,000,000,000, whether by bonds or taxation, is going to greatly embarrass the Government, would you not think he ought to defer his demand for awhile at least and help to save his Government from embarrassment?

Mr. DICKINSON. Would not that same thing apply to these civilservice employees who are getting the $240 bonus, and to everybody else in the country?

Mr. KITCHIN. It is inconceivable to me that a man who is absolutely disinterested can not see the difference between this $240 socalled bonus which the Government is paying to its clerks in order to compensate them for the increased cost of living, and a bonus to the soldiers such as provided in this suggested legislation. The Government is allowing its employees a $240 increase in salary a year, temporarily, while they are still working for the Government, to compensate them or in away offset the abnormally increased cost of living, while the enlisted man was serving the Government, the increased cost of living was paid for by the Government and not by him. The Government was therefore paying the same kind of a bonus to the enlisted man in paying for the increased cost of living for him-in furnishing all of his clothes, food, shoes, fuel,

shelter, heat, and everything. It is estimated that on account of the increased cost of living during the war, it cost the Government a fraction over $300 a year for an enlisted man more than it did before the war.

Mr. SUMMERS. You mean while he was in the service?

Mr. KITCHIN. While he was in the service.

Mr. SUMMERS. But what about the enlisted men when they come out of the service?

Mr. KITCHIN. We do not pay the employee or clerk who goes out of the Government service $240 extra or any amount extra. He gets it only while working for the Government.

Mr. SUMMERS. But you are paying him all the time here, while the enlisted man is getting out of the service and trying to get into his usual employment again.

Mr. KITCHIN. We are simply allowing them this amount to offset temporarily the abnormally high cost of living, to compensate for the increasing cost, while the Government paid that increased cost in providing living expenses for the soldier.

Mr. SUMMERS. Mr. Kitchin, I have thought about this thing a great deal for several months, and I have come to this conclusion, that here are two boys, both of whom come up before the draft board. This one is taken. This one has crossed toes, and he has to stay at home. This one goes in, and, to say nothing about the sacrifices that he makes and the chances he takes with his life and his health and everything of that kind, he gets $1 a day and his clothing and something to eat. The cross-toed man at home gets anywhere from $5 to $10. Now, I have come to the conclusion that this man is entitled to something in the way of additional compensation to help to even him up a little bit, with the young man with crossed toes who is now well established in life, whereas this fellow comes out at the foot of the ladder.

Mr. KITCHIN. I understand; but if it is equitable, if it is right to allow him anything in order to equalize him with the cross-toed fellow, he ought to have the same, and his bonus should be $1,500 a year rather than $400 or $500, as this here provides. The crosstoed man who could not go and was not permitted to go was making $5 a day, while the man who went into the Army got $1 a day, and in order to make them equal, instead of paying the soldier $1 a day, as you provide in your bill, or $50 a month, we ought to pay him $4 a day extra.

Mr. SUMMERS. No; not with his clothing, his board, and those things.

Mr. GARNER. If you recognize that principle, and we pay a part of what we owe him, would we not be obligated to pay the balance of what we owe him, and if he can show that, as a matter of fact, in order to rehabilitate him and put him on the same plane with his neighbor, instead of owing him $50 a month for the time that he was in the service, we owed him $150 a month, which was what we paid his neighbor, would we not owe him $100 more?

Mr. SUMMERS. I did not say they were receiving on an average of $150 a month. Of course, I took the case of a man receiving $5 or $10 a day for the purpose of illustration, but it is not true that all the young men at home averaged that amount, and I have provided

in my bill that which would bring the compensation of the ex-service man up to something like the average of what the other young man received who remained at home.

The CHAIRMAN. Let me say to you that we have gone on during the war and since the war paying the Government clerks a bonus, first, of $120, and then they asked for $240, and we gave it to them, and they have asked for $480, and they are likely to lose the whole thing by asking for too much, but we went on paying that, and whether we raised that money from the issuance of bonds or taxing the people it did not make a flurry upon the market at all, and nobody complained.

Perhaps every man at the table here voted for it. I do not remember whether I did or not. I suppose I did.

Mr. GARNER. I do not think you did, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Wait a minute. Let me proceed with this suggestion. Now, then, the soldier boy, while he was fed, clothed, housed, and shoed while over in France, slept in the trenches and on the ground and ate hard-tack and corned beef, while the fellow at home. slept in a good bed, under a roof, was sheltered from the storm, and sat down to a good table, and got from $5 to $15 a day, and not a word was said about it.

Now, because the soldier wants something to reimburse himself for the great sacrifices he has made it is going to bankrupt the Government. I can not quite understand how that conclusion can be arrived at.

Mr. KITCHIN. I do not want to congratulate the chairman on his imagination.

The CHAIRMAN. My imagination is not so great. Let us hear the witness for a few minutes, and then we will hear the Treasury officials, and stop this arguing among ourselves. I want to say to you gentlemen on both sides that when you ask questions which are unreasonable, as I think, I am going to have my say, and I am not going to be ridiculed in doing it, either.

Mr. CRISP. Does your bill provide for giving this bonus to the officers?

Mr. SUMMERS. Yes; there is nobody excluded; but I believe it should be amended so as to make it optional so that it will only be paid on application for the same.

Mr. GARNER. In other words, you would not force anybody to take the money?

Mr. SUMMERS. I understand there are some who would not want it forced upon them, and I would not do that.

Mr. CRISP. I do not think you would have many of those. Do you think the officers who received more compensation while in the service than they did before they went in are entitled to additional compensation?

Mr. SUMMERS. Well, you have the problem to consider of where the officer lands when he comes out of the service, whether he is at a different point in life financially to what he would have been if he had not gone into the service, although he may have received more during the time he served; and, Mr. Crisp, we can not make a bill to cover every specific instance, and we all recognize that.

Now, as a general statement, I want to say that I have not in mind any thought or any attempt to try to pay these boys for patriotism

or for the real sacrifices that they made in going to the front. That is not the idea at all. And as far as the bond issue instead of cash is concerned, all of the posts that I have heard from are agreeable to this sort of a settlement, except one, and they want cash. They insist on cash instead of bonds.

Mr. GARNER. One of them used the term the other day, "The long green"?

Mr. SUMMERS. Yes.

Mr. TREADWAY. How did you reach the conclusion in your own mind that $50 a month or $25 for a portion of a month, or practically $50 a month, was an equitable adjustment?

Mr. SUMMERS. By my knowledge of the wages of the average man at home, as I have known him during the emergency.

Mr. TREADWAY. You figured it out?

Mr. SUMMERS. I figured it out; and this was, after thinking it over, as nearly an equitable arrangement as I could arrive at.

Mr. TREADWAY. Then you considered that if that amount was paid to each ex-service man that would practically finish his claim to an equality against the Government?

Mr. SUMMERS. As far as compensation is concerned.

Mr. TREADWAY. So you do not think in the near future there would be another call for further relief?

Mr. SUMMERS. I can not tell you anything about whether there would be or not, but I can not believe there ever would be on the question of compensation; I do not believe there ever would be in adjusting compensation.

Mr. OLDFIELD. You think they would call it something else next time?

Mr. KITCHIN. They would call it "gratitude indebtedness" next time.

Mr. SUMMERS. Well, Mr. Kitchin, I do not have that opinion of any one of these boys.

Mr. KITCHIN. We had an officer here the other day who said, "This is not the last time." He said, "If they do not come back for some more, it will be the first time in the history of the Government." The CHAIRMAN. He said he did not believe it would be the last time, only he did not know. Let us keep his record straight and then go on. I am not going to sit here and have misstatements made about these things.

Mr. SUMMERS. In order to conclude as rapidly as possible, I will ask the indulgence of the committee, if you will permit me, to give you this expression from the Veterans' Vocational Club, Pullman Post No. 2, Pullman, Wash., composed of about 140 crippled boys who are taking vocational training. Here is their discussion on this matter, and it seems to me that it is very sane and very reasonable, and with that I wish to conclude unless there are some other questions. This letter reads as follows:

VETERANS VOCATIONAL CLUB,

PULLMAN POST, No. 2, Pullman, Wash., February 26, 1920.

JOHN W. SUMMERS, M. C.,

Washington, D. C.

DEAR SIR: Your letter of February 17, 1920, was received and the contents given careful consideration by the executive committee of this club.

The members of this club have put themselves on record as being very much in favor of your bill. It is the fairest in every way of any bill that has yet