Word: pensionable
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Into Judge Wheat's court trooped attorneys for 134 of the nation's 149 Class I railroads, crying protest at what, to them, looked like a gross violation of the "due process of law" provision of the Constitution. The pension system would cost them $60,000,000 in its first year, more later. The extra burden, they declared, would break the back of many a tottering line...
...found that about one-fifth of all railroad employes work at mining, upkeep, repair, clerical or other jobs which take them across no State lines. Four complaining companies alone owned $86,000,000 worth of property classified as non-carrier and yet were asked to pension employes in such enterprises. Some lines, like New York's Long Island R. R., lay entirely within the borders of a single State...
Though unwilling to deny that Congress might legally set up a pension system applying strictly to workers whose jobs took them back & forth across State lines, Judge Wheat allowed himself to doubt whether any compulsory system could retain the incentives to gratitude and loyalty found in voluntary systems. Mightily offended was his sense of justice at inclusion in the present system of some 143,000 workers who had lost their jobs in the year before it was adopted. "Some of these men," snapped he, "were dismissed for the good of the service. I can see no reasonable relation between giving...
Equally repugnant to Judge Wheat was the Act's provision allowing any worker hired by a railroad to count toward his pension all previous railroad service. Declared he: "To require the plaintiffs to contribute huge sums of money to be devoted to the payment of pensions and annuities based upon services long since completed and fully paid for seems to me to take their property without due process...
...Brighton. It is 1811; Brummell struts at Bath; in & out of prim Adam houses parades the world of fashion; Guardsmen wear tight breeches; George IV is Regent. Paul's plan is to marry off his Melanie (small, saucy Yvonne Printemps) to a highborn tripper, thereby assuring himself a pension. The Regent himself asks Melanie to a souper à deux. The choleric Earl of Harringford offers her protection and a house just off Belgrave Square. His son. the Marquis of Sheere, also falls under Melanie's spell. Both Earl and Regent want something "a little less binding" than marriage...