Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 14/Review of Mr. Scott's Writings

by Leslie McChesney Scott

REVIEW OF MR. SCOTT'S WRITINGS ON HIS FAVORITE AND MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECTS

By Leslie M. Scott

OUTLINE

1. Pioneer Influence on the Writings.
2. Intellectual Range of Mr. Scott.
3. Literary and Historical Essays.
4. Religious and Theological Topics.
5. Sound Money:
   1. Long Fight Against Fiatism.
   2. Greenbackism.
   3. Free Coinage of Silver.
6. Reconstruction After Civil War.
7. Negro and South.
8. National Idea:
   1. Its Progress After Civil War.
   2. Rival Doctrines of Hamilton and Jefferson.
9. Expansion of National Territory.
10. Tariff, Revenue and "Protection."
11. Chinese Exclusion.
12. Coxey Armies.
13. Individualism:
    1. In Morals.
    2. In Industry.
14. Socialism:
    1. Analysis of Its Doctrines.
    2. Spread of Governmental Function.
    3. Single Tax on Land.
15. Evils of Large Wealth.
16. The "Oregon System."
17. Local Controversies:
    1. Railroad Disputes.
    2. Mortgage Tax.
    3. High Cost Living.
18. Ethics of Journalism.
19. His Devotion to the Public Interest.

This review of Mr. Scott's work is based on a collection of some ten thousand articles written by him in the course of his long and busy life. Yet even this seemingly large number is small in comparison with the author's great output. It is no easy task to summarize the collection in the space here allotted; quite impossible to detail it minutely. Therefore we shall treat only most important general subjects, or rather, favorite ones of the Editor's writing. And first let us note the predominating idea of his editorial productions—his devotion to individual function and duty. This motive of the pioneer era he bespoke probably more forcefully than any other writer of his generation.

IPIONEER CHARACTER

As each man's character is formed by ancestral and youthful environment, it may be interesting to note the conditions which molded the life of Mr. Scott. From his pioneer heritage of the Western frontier he derived his vigor of utterance and personality. From this same experience he found his democratic sympathies; perceived national tendencies; gained breadth of view, which he extended by reading; learned humble toils and frugalities; brought himself close to feelings of Western folk and acquired the principles of self-dependence and individual responsibility which mark all his work. He was a self-made man, had made his way as a youth, unaided, and gained rudiments of an education through his own energies. It was but natural, therefore, that he continually urged habits of self-help on the later generation.

Mr. Scott was an individualist in personal habit, in precept, in lessons of industry, sobriety, economy—in all that works for personal thrift; an individualist in parental discipline of the home; an individualist in face of growing demands for "community help" and government paternalism. This ever-present idea in his writings will afford basis of understanding for his readers who may think back on what he published day by day or who may examine his articles hereafter.

Let it be remembered that the American frontiersman and pioneer expected to overcome obstacles in their path, alone. In time of savage warfare, they united, but this necessity was only occasional. When a barn was to be "raised" they met together, but this was quite in the nature of a "social function." For mutual protection, they sometimes "crossed the plains" in organized companies, but with danger absent, they chose to travel in small parties or alone. They supported community schools, but it is testimony of survivors that children learned rudiments of education chiefly at home. The whole mode of life of the Pioneer West taught each person and each married couple to work out their own fortune and to be responsible for their own spiritual salvation. It never occurred to them that the community owed anybody a living. Government was not depended upon to give a "lift" nor to create a "job" nor to regulate health or morals or wages, nor to pension the unfortunate.

That this mode of life developed a hardy race needs but bare mention here. It brought out resourcefulness, initiative, selfreliance. It fostered the democratic spirit, raised high the level of public and private morals. It barred caste and discontent of older communities. It is manifest that best traits have come out of the West. Mr. Bryce has said "The West is the most American part of America." And a remark of another writer is equally true: "America was bred in a cabin"—a dwelling of logs, symbolizing the rough strength of the people.

Out of such life came the later Editor, Mr. Scott, in Tazewell County, central Illinois. His grandfather, James Scott, was the first settler in Groveland Township in 1824, from Kentucky. Mr. Scott's father, John Tucker Scott, twenty years later thought of moving to Texas, as James had moved to Illinois, but instead came to Oregon, in 1852. The six or seven-year-old son—the editor-to-be—wondered if Texas was a less chilly abode and asked: "Father, is Texas a tight house?" This question indicates the simplicity of the pioneer dwelling. With the family of John Tucker Scott came to Oregon sturdy principles of morality and industry, which invigorated the career of the editor. Mr. Scott always took sentimental interest in matters of Oregon history. His writings on these subjects make a valuable collection. At some future time it is the purpose of the present writer to give them publication. These subjects held him with the filial attachments of a son toward his forebears. Mr. Scott delighted to lay aside even most pressing tasks to "talk over" old times or to greet companions or con- temporaries of his youth. His sanctum door was open to such visitors oftentimes when others could not gain entrance and when his newspaper work suffered for the interruption. Once, George H. Himes, meeting Mr. Scott when the latter was under heavy pressure of business, hastened to say that John Forbes,^[1] of Olympia, a companion of Mr. Scott's in Captain Swindall's company in the Indian war of 1855-6, was in Portland. "John Forbes!" "John Forbes!" exclaimed Mr. Scott. "Bring him to see me!" "But," hesitated Mr. Himes, "you're so busy." "Never mind, never mind! Bring him up!" A similar interview preceded an appointment for Bill Ruddell.^[2] On each occasion Mr. Scott abandoned his editorial tasks and gave up a long period to the interview.

II INTELLECTUAL RANGE

Mr. Scott was conspicuously a reader as well as a writer. His library was his place of recreation; to companionship of his books he devoted large part of his daily life. His reading was constant and unflagging to his last days. Never for long did he engage in conversation, except during after-dinner periods, when surrounded by friends or members of his family. That was his social intercourse. These intellectual after-feasts covered widest range of religion, history and literature, nature and spirit, matter and mind. The great storehouse of his memory yielded allusions and quotations which charmed his auditors with their versatility. At such times, the Editor truly unfolded the greatness of his mind, the universality of his talents, the accuracy of his memory, the maturity of his scholarship. Many were his philosophical and theological disquisitions; his narratives of great men and great events; his discourses on Shakespeare and Milton and Homer and Goethe and Dante and others too numerous for mention here. His touches on the moral and the spiritual delighted his hearers. He could talk on most intricate doctrinal subjects; none could speak more precisely on Fall of Man or Resurrection or Atonement. But he preferred reflections on daily good conduct and non-dogmatized deity. In these conversations his sincerity, humility and docility of spirit would have surprised the orthodox who, perhaps, that very day had stirred his resistance by their dogmatic efforts to repress him. Along with his fine literary, historical and religious perceptions, he possessed much practical sense for every-day affairs in these discourses. Never did he soar away with dreams or ideals that he forgot life's earthly matters.

These periods of his relaxation lasted an hour or two hours; then back he went to his desk or his books. The chief lesson of his daily life was his economy of time and effort. He entertained rarely and joined social gatherings seldom. Many persons thought him unsociable, reticent, taciturn, severe; whereas his were the direct opposite of all those traits. Without such habits he could not have covered the vast areas where his studies took him. His singleness of aim and unity of pursuit were to equip his mind with copious supply for his daily writings. These matters are mentioned here to show that Mr. Scott's

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HARVEY W. SCOTT

AT 62 YEARS OF AGE. PHOTOGRAPH BY LEE MOORHOUSE AT BINGHAM SPRINGS, UMATILLA COUNTY, IN THE SUMMER OF 1900

writings, admirable though they are in the collection, omit much of his intellectual output.

IIILITERARY AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS

Most delightful of Mr. Scott's productions were his frequent writings on subjects of literature, history, and theology. These marked him as one of the ablest essayists of his day. Seldom does a scholar become a powerful editor. Scarcely any of the great editors have been great scholars. The editor of practical affairs, idealistic sense and scholarly attainment is the rarest combination. But such a combination was Mr. Scott. Amid his busiest work, dealing with current affairs, he would insert a frequent article on some phase of the genius of Shakespeare or on a theme of Milton, or Tennyson, or Cervantes, or one of a host of others. These commentaries on literary matters, so remote from centers of scholarship, were objects of surprise and admiration the country over. No man could have afforded his community wider variety of reading than did Mr. Scott. His favorite books were the Bible and Shakespeare, Milton and Burke. He re-read these constantly and had their contents always at command. Napoleon and Cromwell were special objects of his study and frequent subjects of his pen. British and French history were as familiar to him as that of his native country. His comments on foreign politics he spiced with historical references. The rivalry of European peoples gave scope for favorite themes of "Race Rivalry a Force of Progress," and "Potent Agency of War in Human Progress." For in Mr. Scott's view, strong and aggressive nations are the ones that arm and take and grow; war is the nursery of national strength; as injustice is always armed, so must justice be; without war despotism would be permanent and evil inveterate; the way to peace is not through non-resistance but through preparedness for war; they who can't fight can't live except in subordination; no morality, no ideals, not backed with arms, can be worth anything; "so it has always been, and so it will be always, and forevermore" (Jan. 5, 1905).

IVRELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL TOPICS

The favorite branch of his historical study was theology. To this study he brought a reverent, tolerant mind; also a rational interpretation that would not be deterred by protest of theologians who resented "invasion" of their sphere. His reading was so wide, his acquaintance with greatest scholars on historical religion was so extensive, that he could wage theological polemics to discomfiture of any orthodox.^[3] He only defended his views, however, never attacked belief or dogma or creed, unless his inquiries were assailed. He never sought to "upset" any religion nor to dissuade from any belief; toward persons who found comfort in any church he was always considerate and sympathetic. But he thought that historical and rational study was not responsible for error or superstition that it revealed. Those persons who knew him well, knew his sincerity, his reverence for the universal idea of men toward deity. Among his friends and admirers were theologians of many divergent sects. Archbishops Gross^[4] and Christie,^[5] the third and fourth heads of the Catholic faith in Oregon, regarded his writings with tolerant and admiring view. The Rev. Arthur J. Brown,^[6] pastor of the leading Presbyterian Church in Portland, himself a clergyman of scholarship, made frequent friendly calls at Mr. Scott's editorial rooms. Many leaders of Methodism held him in high regard and on October 10, 1908, he delivered an address in their leading church in Portland, at its semi-centennial celebration. At one period he was a regular contributor to the Pacific Christian Advocate (Methodist) and was on intimate terms with most of its successive editors. On June 15, 1906, he delivered an address at Salem on Jason Lee and early Methodism in Oregon. Many years before, Methodists had chosen him President of Portland University. Rabbi J. Bloch^[7] and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise^[8] of Portland, noted leaders of Jewish thought, found much satisfaction in his writings. Rev. Roland D. Grant,^[9] of the Baptists, opened his pulpit to Mr. Scott on Thanksgiving Day, 1895, for the best utterance Mr. Scott ever made on the subject of religion. In Congregational circles Mr. Scott found congenial association and with that church maintained a nominal affiliation. His friendly relations with Rev. T. L. Eliot,^[10] Unitarian, began with the arrival of the latter in Portland in 1867 and lasted until Mr. Scott's death. The Christian Science following liked the tolerant spirit of Mr. Scott, and extended to him the privilege of their platform for an address,^[11] on November 15, 1903. Although these several sects represented diverging doctrines and his historical and rational studies startled the theologians of each in turn, yet most of them perceived him an exponent of modern scholarship in its inevitable trend toward a truer and fuller expression of religious faith. Ever present in his thought was the motto, "The form of religion passes; the substance is eternal." Men's battles of opinion were over the forms. "The religious nature of man continually struggles for expression," he said in his Thanksgiving day address in 1895, "and its manner of expression changes from age to age. Yet we call each formulated, transitory expression a creed, as if it were to be permanent, and often contend for that creed as if it were the absolute truth; but it passes into something else in the next ages. Yet the religious feeling is the permanent force in the nature of man."

Occasionally there was protest from a clergyman who feared the Editor's inquiries were sapping the strength of belief in particular sects. In 1909 the head of one of the largest church denominations wrote Mr. Scott a letter saying that his articles were "cutting the ground from under the feet" of his church. The Editor's response, by private letter, dated August 3, 1909, was the last comprehensive statement of his life study on this subject. As it epitomizes his opinions so completely, it is offered here in part:

"The Oregonian 'assails' no religion nor religious belief. It does not, however, deem itself forbidden to inquire into the concepts of religion or of theological systems—especially of such as most persistently urge their 'claims' on public attention. The Oregonian under my hand, has dealt with these subjects, as an incident of its work, these many, many years; very inadequately, I know—yet not to the dissatisfaction of the great multitude of its readers.

"You, of course, it would not expect to please, since one who deems his own creed or formula the last word on religion can scarcely be expected to open his mind to other or dissentient views. Your position requires you to profess an infallibility. The Oregonian makes no such pretension. It simply wishes to apply the tests of reason, of experience, of judgment, and of such knowledge as history affords from the manifestations of the religious principle in man, to some of the phases of the thought and inquiry of our time.

"Christianity is a fact and it is to be accounted for. You account for it in one way, I in another. You rest on the miraculous and supernatural; I do not—nor do I think there is wickedness in any inquiry into the origin of theological or ecclesiastical concepts, or in comparison of religions with each other, with a view to discovery of a common principle in all.

"Your assumption that it is not a proper province of a newspaper to touch a subject which clergymen (or some of them) claim as their exclusive field, I cannot admit; more especially since, as a newspaper man, in active touch with the public mind during more than forty years, I have found no feature of the Oregonian's work more sought or approved than in the field from which you would bar it. I am old enough and have had experience enough to tender advice also; and I must assure you that you ought to begin to know, even if you can't acknowledge, that the greater part of mankind, even of the so-called Christian world, has a profound tendency towards a rational, historical and comparative view and interpretation of religions in their various forms—the Christian religion included with the rest. Dogma can no more support the mythical element in one religion than in another. The time is coming when Christianity will abandon the effort altogether; but its last stronghold will be the Roman Catholic Church.

VSOUND MONEY EFFORTS: LONG FIGHT AGAINST FIATISM

Most persistent and successful of his many editorial efforts, was his perennial fight for "sound money." In this work he bespoke the intensity of the nationalizing purpose of the country. The contest for fiat money began as one of state sovereignty,, involving local issues of note currency; with state rights conquered in the Civil War, the idea endured in questions involving payment of the war debt; surviving that struggle came "Repudiation" of 1866-70,—that is, payment in depreciated greenbacks—and then free silverism, which meant payment in debased silver coinage. Also surviving the war came demand for abolition of national bank currency, which had supplanted state bank notes. And breeding out of the mania was a train of numerous delusions about need of "more money."

Not yet thirty years of age, when the "sound money" question sprang up after the Civil War, possessing no experience in banking or finance, new in his profession of Editor, and far distant from the centers of the country's discussion, Mr. Scott yet applied principles and judged current issues with remarkable precision. His articles reveal wonderful acumen for an author so young. On every financial issue he "started" right and subsequent events vindicated his views.

Throughout his newspaper life Mr. Scott was writing on currency and coin; almost daily he treated some matter of financial policy with application to Western life. His writings on these topics are models of directness, clearness and resourcefulness. The fruitage of his long struggle was the victory of the gold standard in the Oregon elections of 1896, in the face of tremendous popular prejudice and seeming defeat. This victory in Oregon was attributed to Mr. Scott by friend and foe and broadened his national fame.

The American people have always been harassed with the "more money" fiat delusion. Among no other people has there been more absurd governmental interference with currency, affecting values, promoting speculation and upsetting confidence. Bitter lessons have been theirs with fiat currency, in colonial times, revolutionary and confederation periods, early years of national life and during and after the Civil War. The delusion has possessed one generation after another that currency is capital; that citizens can be made prosperous with cheap substitutes for gold money. Even yet, the insidious fiat notion persists, though in lesser degree, than heretofore. Silver and paper currency was of doubtful redeemability until the gold standard was secured in 1896 and 1900. Only strong, recuperative powers of the Nation have prevented overthrow of the gold standard of value and the good faith of the government.

However much of the greatness of the American Nation has come out of the progressive spirit of the pioneer West, however puny or different the American State would have been without the stimulus coming out of the land toward the setting sun, it is fair to say that out of this expanding land came also the financial and monetary heresies that have afflicted its politics, business and industry. The virile race of the West, restive under its poverty, confused capital with money, falsely thinking that, if currency be multiplied, capital could be multiplied also.

Himself, a son of the West, Mr. Scott knew its mind as to money and capital as intimately as any man could know it. This knowledge equipped him to cope with it in his skillful way. Perhaps no other writer of the day equalled him in this perception and in ability to meet it. His struggle through 45 years was laborious, distasteful to himself, creative of personal animosities. He estranged his closest friends by sharp criticisms of their advocacy of silver coinage. But he regarded that issue the most critical in the country's industrial history and he could not be deterred from, his duty by matters of friendship. His appeals reached the sober thought of the Commonwealth and Oregon finally surprised the Nation by supporting the gold standard and rejecting Bryan after its politicians and office holders during many years had been committing the State to silver.

Money is to be gained from work, he used to repeat in his newspaper, not from the government's printing presses nor from the stamping machine of the mint. Best money will be abundant enough if not driven out by cheap "money"—depreciated paper or debased silver. "Reasonable men do not expect to obtain money," he said, "unless they have something to give for it, either labor or goods. If money is to be easily had without effort, it will have little value. If best money is hard to earn, the people will not be benefited by cheap money. The only real money is gold. They cannot improve by issuing doubtful substitutes for it and declaring by law the substitutes just as good. To be just as good as gold they must be payable in gold."

GREENBACKISM

Right after the Civil War came the contest over payment of the war debt, then amounting to nearly three billion dollars. "Contraction" of the greenback debt, $433,000,000—retirement of legal tender notes—made the first controversy. But these debt notes have continued from that day to this, an ever-present menace to stability of the nation's credit and currency. The ablest financiers of both political parties have urged their retirement. The young Editor took solid ground, therefore, when he insisted that these notes were not "money" but evidences of debt; that their withdrawal would not diminish the "circulating medium" but increase it and promote confidence; that their continuance necessitated heavy gold reserve for redemption and was a costly menace to government credit. Their use, he pointed out, tempted to evils of inflation. These evils he displayed clearly and often, both when greenbacks were at discount, prior to the year 1879, and later when this credit currency and silver coinage were shaking the monetary stability of the government.

Resisting "contraction" of greenbacks, Democrats also opposed redemption of such notes, or any of the nation's debt, in gold. They likewise fought conversion of greenbacks into bonds. Led by George H. Pendleton and sustained by President Johnson, they 'wished to pay bonds and other debt paper in more greenbacks, especially printed for the purpose, then much below par. They also wished to tax government bonds despite a direct pledge of law that they should be tax free. Pendleton was defeated on these issues.

The policy of "repudiation" of the public debt by payment in depreciated currency, instead of in full-value gold, was hotly contested. Mr. Scott insisted that the government should pay its obligations in full in gold both principal and interest for thus only could the government keep faith; that the debt exchanged for notes, would not be paid, because the notes must still be paid; and that the notes could not be made as good as gold coin unless redeemable in gold coin. The young Editor had the satisfaction of seeing advocates of repudiation defeated in 1868-9.

It was no argument to the Editor that large part of the government debt was owing speculators who had bought the claims at discount. Against numerous schemes for scaling down the debt he used the vigor of his pen, with constant appeals to national honor. He cited that the same sophisms were then used against full payment of government obligations as after the Revolutionary War. "The scheme at that time was called 'scaling down the debt,'" he wrote December 6, 1867, "and though it was pressed with vigor and importunacy, it signally failed. Our fathers refused to sanction any such disreputable plan of virtual repudiation. Cannot the repudiators of today learn honesty as well as wisdom from the fathers of our government?" And again November 18, 1867: "The proposition to pay the national debt in greenbacks is simply a proposition to take away an interest-bearing security from those who purchased in good faith the bonds of the national government, and substitute for it a security that bears no interest. It would be equivalent to the act of a debtor taking

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HARVEY W. SCOTT

AT AGE OF 66 YEARS. THIS WAS A CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDE

away from his creditor a mortgage note bearing interest, and giving in its stead a due bill bearing no interest."

Against greenbackism, he was continually referring to payday or redemption. The integrity of currency notes, he was always saying, depends on purpose and ability of the government to redeem them in gold coin not in depreciated paper promises. Of the plan to print enough greenbacks to take up the national debt this was the programme of "greenbackism,"—he wrote:

February 18, 1878—This would be a thorough and logical method of carrying out the greenback scheme. It would simply be repudiation of the entire debt; for there would be no hope that so great an amount of greenbacks would be redeemed; no time for redemption would or could be specified and as holders would receive no interest the greenbacks would not possess a single quality of value."

August 31, 1892—"While it is true that government may issue paper and call it money, yet it is with government as with the individual that which costs nothing is worth nothing. There is no juggle in values. Many who see the paper bill, forget that there is value behind it, stored up in gold or silver; but the value is there, and this is what gives the paper note the function and character of money. Increase the paper notes beyond redeemability and their value is gone or impaired altogether. Among all nations and in all ages where this has been tried, the result has been the same."

April 8, 1898—"The truth is, we buy only with gold coin, to which alone the name of money ought to be applied. No bank note, treasury note or paper certificate, in any form or by whomsoever issued, is more than an instrument of credit. It is an order and a security (so long as the party issuing it is solvent) for a sum of money and is good for the sum it calls for, only so long as gold can be obtained for it . . . . We have more of the notes now than formerly, because we have more gold to stand for them; and we have more gold because we have ceased to expel gold from the country or to drive it into hiding at home by ceasing the threat of free coinage of silver and by stopping the purchase of silver for issue of paper upon it."

The right system of currency, he said, would be patterned after those of the great nations of Europe, which employ the medium of a great central bank. But Mr. Scott knew full well the popular prejudice in the United States against the central bank system and did not hope for restoration of the Hamilton plan of government credit, which he always defended. Perceiving the futility of overcoming this prejudice he had little hope that the American currency system soon could be brought to needed efficiency. The "fundamental error" of our currency he pointed out as follows (March 8, 1908): "There is a fundamental error in our monetary system. It is the parent of all other errors that beset the system. This error is the fiat notion of money . . . But these notes are not money. They are merely substitutes for money whose value depends on their redeemability in gold or the prospect of it . . . This, it is asserted, is cheap money, for it costs nobody anything. But the government's fiat money is dearest of all forms of currency. It requires gold to be banked up in enormous sums for its protection . . . It is an impeachment of the intelligence that tolerates such a financial or monetary system. . . The Treasury is simply warehousing gold against its own obligations. . . . With the enormous sum of one billion dollars in gold held by the Treasury under our inelastic and immovable system, we are unable to keep circulation afoot. Every now and then it congeals, freezes up, simply stops. But the Bank of France and the Bank of Germany make their gold support a paper currency twice in excess of the proportion of our own."

The great need, he said, in order to give control and steadiness to financial affairs and the currency system, is a central bank and branches modeled after the United States Bank founded by Hamilton in 1791, and after government banks of Europe. On November 23, 1909, he wrote:

"Our people, believing they can regulate by their votes, the value of money, and calling notes issued by authority of the government, money, will not permit any rational currency or rational banking system to be established in the United States.

. . . It is useless, therefore, to attempt a remedy now for the defects of our banking and currency system. We shall be compelled to blunder along with the system as it is, and ^to accept the consequences of such financial collapses as it will, at intervals, necessarily produce. Sometime we may become wise enough to have a great central bank, with branches all over the country, like the Bank of France, whose strength was so great that even the Commune of Paris, in the ascendant in 1871, dared not touch it."

FREE COINAGE OF SILVER

Greenbackism waned in strength after 1880, for then a new fiat doctrine was spreading—free coinage of silver at ratio of 16 to 1—which largely supplanted the idea of fiat paper. The same arguments, in the main, were used against the silver heresy as earlier against the paper delusion; with the important difference that silver coins possessed bullion value whereas paper currency had no intrinsic value whatever. Free coinage of silver could not be redeemable in gold money nor could unlimited issue of paper currency. Both would make inflation, and debasement of silver would make depreciation of paper worse, because then the remote expectation of redemption in gold would be gone. Silver coins would fall to their bullion value of between 76 and 46 cents (1891–1901); paper currency would fall to whatever level credit confidence would give it (in 1864, 39 cents gold). Following the popular project of paying the national debt in greenbacks, came the scheme to pay it in debased silver dollars. Mr. Scott fought these later phases of fiat money as he did the earlier. When frequently asked late in life how he placed himself right on subtle questions of finance, even in their hazy beginnings, and kept consistent course through years of polemics, he was wont to answer: "By study of history I learned fundamental principles. By adhering to the principles of universal human experience, I pursued the right and logical course; I could not go wrong."

For versatility and force, the Oregon editor's treatment of free silver is one of the most notable feats in journalism. It was the longest and hardest work of his career. He began in 1877, when silver advocates were first growing aggressive and when few conservative persons were aware of the danger of silver inflation. He ransacked his library for argument and example. He used his full literary skill to present the subject from all possible angles. Dealing with what he called "fundamental principles" he would tolerate no mere "opinion" from adversaries. He considered such opinion unread, untaught and ignorant. It was not a question, he said, on which men could differ or compromise, as on tariff. He gave large space in his columns to silver advocates, but made replies which excited them to charges of arbitrary and dogmatic intolerance.

Mr. Scott answered that ignorance was not entitled to opinion on principles as absolute as those of mathematics or money. "Somebody," he wrote (December 10, 1907), "asks if there can't be 'an honest difference of opinion about the gold standard.' There can be no honest difference of opinion where one of the parties knows nothing of what he is talking about. There may be honest ignorance. But it is entitled to no opinion." And on April 26, 1904: "The silver craze was the greatest menace the country ever knew. It has completely passed away. It was no ordinary question, on which difference of opinion was to be expected, but the standard was a matter of economics as certain as the truths of mathematics or of astronomy. Hence the notion, that some hold to this day, that there ever could have been any difference of opinion or question whatever, among men of honest intelligence, whether the gold standard should be maintained or the silver standard substituted for it, through free coinage of silver, is impossible. It was not a matter of opinion at all, and no more open to debate than the multiplication table."

In the midst of debate preceding the election of 1896, the strong words of the editor denouncing the silver fallacy were termed by an opponent "abusive." To which Mr. Scott replied (August 8, 1896): "It is not so; but when a man sets himself up to fight the book of arithmetic and to insist that something can be made out of nothing, it is necessary to answer him plainly." But toward open-minded ignorance, Mr. Scott was always kind. Challenged in 1896 as "abusive," he retorted that plain statement of "fundamental principles" ought not to be termed abusive and he then proceeded to state the "principles":

"The Oregonian does not use abuse as a weapon against anybody. Persons have the habit of using the words 'abuseand 'abusive' too freely. Plain statement of unpalatable facts, clear presentation of fundamental laws which contradict popular prejudice or excite popular passion, are resented as "abusive.' The Oregonian pleads guilty to a certain dogmatism in discussing the silver question. There is no other method than the dogmatic in dealing with fixed and unchangeable principles. . . . . That the purchasing power of money is exactly equal to the commercial value of the material of which it is made; that when two kinds of money of different value are given free coinage and unlimited circulation, the cheaper being preferred in payment of debts, drives the dearer out of use—these are laws as absolute and inexpugnable as those of gravity and chemical affinity As well indict the fairness and temper of the teacher of mathematics who declines to discuss patiently the proposition that with support of a government fiat, two and two might make five. . . The Oregonian has no original knowledge on these subjects. Its wisdom is all secondhand. It has no information not accessible to every student. It knows that the fundamental principles of monetary science are absolute, because human experience for 2500 years so teaches. . . . They are the property of the human race. Only ignorance, presumptuous folly or selfish interest ignore or defy them."

Popular resistance to "inexorable laws" of money and value he declared futile, no matter what election majorities might be and disaster's that would come to a people from such resistance are inevitable (August 27, 1893):

"In every country and in every age there have been attempts to introduce cheap substitutes for money and the results have always been the same—failure and disaster. Yet there is an instinctive popular feeling, and often a popular revolt, against the inexorable law of values, and multitudes, instead of conforming to it and working in accord with it, try in vain to get away from what they regard as its tyrannies. A people may thus bring disaster on themselves and ruin to their fortunes, but the law remains. . . . The co-ordination of knowledge gathered from the experience of many centuries is by no means an easy thing. Dependence therefore, on great thinkers and writers becomes necessary for the masses."

Mr. Scott lived to see the silver fallacy completely abandoned and his resistance to it lauded from one end of the nation to the other. His success may be better appreciated when it is noted that his own party—Republican—in several state platforms, in Oregon, sustained the silver propaganda and other times "straddled" it. Oregon had been represented in Congress by men who supported free silver, but in 1896 they and numerous other politicians, who long had fought Mr. Scott's money "principles," were converted to the gold standard.

It need not be said that each advance of the silver propaganda was opposed by the Oregon Editor at big personal sacrifice. Circulation and earnings of the newspaper which he edited were greatly depleted. Silver adherents were numerous and aggressive and probably a big majority of the population of the State in the early contest. He attacked the Bland Silver Act of 1878 and the Sherman Silver Act of 1890; pointed out that the government was unable to circulate the silver currency provided in those acts because business would not retain it; showed that each act was depleting the gold redemption reserve; predicted disaster, collapse, and silver basis of values. These writings, covering a period of twenty years, are a marvel of literary force and reasoning power. From the first appearance of the silver delusion in 1877 he predicted the financial crisis that culminated in 1885 and 1893. On November 7, 1877, when silver advocates were pressing the issue that resulted in the Bland law, he said: "A debased and unstable silver currency will take the place of gold as fast as silver can be coined. All the talk about a double standard is merest moonshine. Gold and silver, everyone should know, will not circulate together when the former is so much more valuable. We shall load ourselves with silver coin and the benefit will fall to other nations, to which our gold will be exported as fast as it comes from the mints or the mines." Yet so elastic was the resource of the country that the collapse was deferred much longer than he thought possible. The force that saved the Nation was President Cleveland, who drove repeal of the silver purchase law in 1893, and maintained the gold redemption fund of the government. These acts, said Mr. Scott, earned Cleveland the lasting gratitude of the country. On the death of Cleveland in 1908, he wrote (June 25):

"A man who performed services to his country at a critical time scarcely excelled by more than two or three of our Presidents, was Grover Cleveland. He was the man for a crisis and he had at once the intelligence, the purpose and the firmness to do his work. . . . No man of clearer vision, in a peculiar crisis, or more resolute to meet the demands of an occasion, has ever appeared in our affairs. His second election was one of the fortunate incidents of the history of the United States. ... In all our history the act of no statesman has been more completely vindicated by results, and by the recognition of his countrymen, than that of Grover Cleveland in ridding the country of the financial fallacies that attended the silver fiat-money propaganda."

In contrast with Cleveland's firmness, said the Editor, was the vacillating policy of McKinley, who during years in Congress paltered with the silver question, failed to see it a dividing and uncompromising issue and, with reluctance, allied himself finally with the gold standard in 1896. 'The President's course," said the Editor December 10, 1899, "has been one of indecision and hesitation. It has been the course of a politician fearful of the effect on his own political fortunes of any open and strong utterance or decided policy." And again, September 26, 1908: "McKinley tried sorely the patience of many, who understood perfectly that gold and silver had long since and forever parted company on the old ratio."

"International bimetallism"—free silver coinage by agreement of the great nations—Mr. Scott declared as impossible as the scheme for the United States alone, because laws of value themselves just! as inevitably against international fiat; moreover, the great nations of Europe did not heed free coinage of silver and did not wish it. While international conferences were held in 1867, 1878, 1881 and 1892, he kept hammering away at his "principles" and scored the conferences as illusions and delusions and "bait for gudgeons." On July 15, 1890, he wrote: "The United States might as well invite the nations of Europe to join in giving practical effect to the dreams of Edward Bellamy, as to ask them to join in an agreement for free coinage of silver."

When one considers,that the gold standard idea made slow progress and that the Republican Party sought to evade it as an s late as 1899, the perseverance of Mr. Scott appears the more laudable. Affirmation of the gold standard in 1896 was followed by immediate recovery of confidence and credit and by unparalleled prosperity. Immense stores of gold were released. Mr. Scott occasionally referred to the vindication of sound money doctrine in his subsequent writings. On November 3, 1907, he said: "All the prophecies of the silver propaganda were at once refuted by recovery of business and credit. But the propagandists of silver ever since have been trying to cover up their confusion by the declaration that the recovery has been due to the increased production of gold. It is as shallow an assertion as any other pretense of the silver craze. There was gold enough, had it not been driven to foreign countries and into hiding places at home by continual injection of over-valued Silver into the circulation of the country. . . . Foreign countries, free from fiat money demagogues, had money enough."

Again, on April 8, 1908: "Of this illusion it may be said that not the wildest dreams of the alchemist or of those adventurers who sailed in quest of the Eldorado, were more extraordinary instances of the human power of self-deception. This prodigious fallacy had its origin in the equivocal use of a word." (Dollar.)

Gravest crisis in the industrial history of America, in Mr. Scott's view, was presented by the silver issue in 1896. Both

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HARVEY W. SCOTT

AT 66 YEARS OF AGE. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN NEAR WASHINGTON, D. C. IN OCTOBER, 1904

before and after the event he held that opinion. Early in 1896 he went to Mexico, so as to learn conditions in that silver-standard country, for information of his Oregon readers. Writing from Mexico City, February 20, 1896, to the Oregonian, he said: "Here in Mexico is the place to observe the workings of cheap money, of money based on the market value of silver. Such money gives but a pittance to labor and debases humanity." Similar debasement of United States silver coins, he declared, would shake the nation terribly. On November 6, 1894, he wrote editorially: "The plunge to a debased standard of money would produce disorders in finance, industry and general business, more frightful than this country has yet known, or the world has ever seen, except perhaps the French Revolution of a century ago." On August 9, 1896, he described the danger thus forcefully: "Never was any question contested between parties, of so mighty import to the people of the United States. It involves a tremendous responsibility, not merely for the present, but for all future time; for, if we go wrong on this subject, we shall have done an act that will produce conditions under which the whole character of the people will be changed. Here, indeed, is the test of success or failure of popular government. If we take the silver standard, it will gradually produce conditions under which the masses of the people will sink to lower levels, because labor, paid in inferior money, will not get its accustomed rewards. Continuance of these conditions will within a few generations effect a transformation of the national character and a national reduction in our scale of civilization." In the evening of his life the Editor was wont to laud the "unselfish patriotism" of "gold standard" Democrats who quit Bryan and voted for McKinley in 1896, in numbers sufficient to turn the election—the popular vote being: McKinley 7,164,000, Bryan 6,562,000. On January 23, 1908, he referred to them thus appreciatively: "In every community to this day the names of these men are remembered. They saved the country from a financial and industrial disaster greater than it has ever known."

VIRECONSTRUCTION AFTER CIVIL WAR

Mr. Scott was called to the editorship of the Oregonian just after the assassination of Lincoln. His article, "The Great Atrocity," was published April 17, 1865. Here was a tragedy in the greatest of all political contests in America. Broadly stated, the issue of the contest was between nationalism and state sovereignty, between ideas of Hamilton and Jefferson, between negro slavery and freedom, between North and South. During the whole period of his career, Mr. Scott was called upon to discuss this issue in its many collateral aspects, as the persistent one separating the two great parties. Almost his last article, April 14, 1910, related to the tragedy of Lincoln. His long-matured opinion he thus expressed:

"On this night, April 14, forty-five years ago, Abraham Lincoln was shot by an assassin. A crime as foolish as horrible. It changed (not for the better) the whole course of American political life, from that day to this, and it may be doubted whether we shall ever escape from the consequences of that horribly mad and criminal act.

"The irrational division of political parties today is a consequence of this crime; and no one can see far enough into the future to imagine when the course of our history, set awry by this act of an assassin, will resume rational or normal line of action.

The young Editor was confronted, after the Civil War, with large questions of Reconstruction. Opposed to slavery and disunion, he had to meet a hostile and bitter element. As a son of the Frontier West, he was born a nationalist and the nationalist idea grew with his manhood. Always in his editorial life that idea spurred him on. But there were many Democrats in Oregon before the War and more of them afterward. On the secession and slavery issues they lost to the Republicans, but in 1865-7 they won the State back. Issues of Reconstruction made acrimonious politics. A leading figure in the national policy was George H. Williams, Senator from Oregon, who originated many measures, including the Fourteenth Amendment. Senator Williams found Mr. Scott his ablest supporter. Friendship between the two, then begun, continued as long as they lived, and on the death of the Senator, the Editor wrote a beautiful tribute and farewell. It was his last large work, for soon afterward sickness stopped his further writing.

Articles of Mr. Scott's, during the Reconstruction period, display moderate and lenient spirit toward the South, yet unyielding demand for extinction of state sovereignty and slavery and for the establishment of national sovereignty and negro freedom. Sovereignty, he insisted, then lay in the victorious North, yet not for vindictive nor despotic purpose. He never reconciled himself to negro suffrage and in his later life, when partisanship disappeared, he felt free to say that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments "made a mess of it" (Oregonian, December 25, 1905), and that "it is not to be denied that the evils of indiscriminate negro suffrage in our Southern States are too great to be permitted." (Oregonian, August 8, 1907.)

VIINEGRO AND SOUTH

The Editor's paternal forebears were loyalists of South Carolina; then pioneers of Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois. In Kentucky, the birthplace of his father was near those of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. Currents of westward expansion merged from South and North in the Ohio Valley, thence diverged northward, westward and southward. Mr. Scott's people abhorred state rights and slavery; in other matters thr.y felt sympathy with the South. After these two issues were eradicated, Mr. Scott felt that sympathy recurring. The negro question in the South he knew a natural one in the white population and not to be argued away. In his later life he often said that disfranchisement or submission of the negro was inevitable. He foresaw that northern sentiment would not strongly resist disfranchisement; commented often on its growing acceptance in the North and on the baseless fear in the South that the North would uphold the negro.

"The negro in every state where the race is very numerous," he wrote on January 7, 1909, "has been almost wholly disfranchised; and the disfranchisement is based on conditions and regulations not likely to be shaken for a long time, if ever. Negro domination, therefore, is no longer a bugbear or terror. . . . The experience of forty years has shown the greater North that the South must be left to manage this great matter for itself." Seven years earlier, when Republicans appointed a partisan committee to inquire into disfranchisement of Southern negroes, he condemned the plan as "useless and silly." "On this subject," he added, "there has been a mighty lot of experience during the past thirty-five years, and it is useless to challenge repetition of it" (March 23, 1902).

Not less useless and silly he deemed the negro question in the South. He called Southern fear of the negro and of Northern prejudice, "a strange nightmare" (November 11, 1904), and an antiquated prejudice. "Why should not the Southern people think of other things than the everlasting negro?" (November 11, 1904.) He pointed out repeatedly that the "nightmare" or "prejudice" was harmful to Southern progress; that it allied the South with repugnant notions of the Democratic Party of the North, such as free silver coinage, opposition to territorial expansion in 1898-1900, and socialistic hostility to private business and property. He could perceive in his last years the slow drift of the conservative South away from the radical Democratic Party of the North. But the change was so slow he would risk no prophesy as to proximity of the outcome. "The negro question," he wrote February 4, 1909, "was the source of the Civil War; it has been the main division of parties since; yet now that the Southern States are finding out they are no longer to be interfered with, in this most important of all matters that concern them, their natural conservatism on other matters asserts itself and takes a new course."

VIIINATIONAL IDEA—ITS PROGRESS AFTER CIVIL WAR

Between the two chief political parties, the main line of demarcation continued to be the national idea, Mr. Scott frequently wrote, when others complained, as in 1904–8, that they could see party distinctions no longer. "The influence of nationalism is the mainspring of party action," he said February 2, 1908, "and must continue to be such. In this national aspect of parties and politics lies the reason why The Oregonian, throughout its whole life, has acted in politics with a view to efficiency in national government. The best exponent of this principle has been the Republican Party." "During fifty years (November 15, 1909) the Republican Party, depending on authority and insisting on the use of it, has done everything. It has been strong, because it is the party of national ideas. In many things the Democratic Party has been a helper, doubtless; but a helper chiefly by its opposition. . . . Most conspicuous display of this fact was when it elected Grover Cleveland to the Presidency in 1892. Cleveland was an asserter of high central authority; and, discovering this, his party exclaimed that it had been 'betrayed' and it repudiated him. Ever since it has followed the Bryan standard."

Party was to Mr. Scott a means to an end, not the end itself. He was too broad-minded to think virtue in a mere party name or to follow party as a fetish. The Republican Party was for him the exponent—the only one—of concentrated and centralized power, in resistance to local authority and disintegration, and in transformation from a federal to a national republic. "During fifty years (May 30, 1904) the Democratic Party has stood for nothing that the country has desired or could deem useful to it. If anything of constructive policy has come out of the Democratic Party these forty years, one would like to be told what it is. This party of opposition has not been useless. Its use has been to force the Republican Party at intervals to justify its aims and claims."

While the Editor had the statesman's lofty view, he was yet an indifferent politician. He cared little about the "offices" nor would the controlling bosses have permitted him to participate in the spoils which his efforts so often put in their hands. His influence with them in party organization was always little or nothing. But his power with the voters, on an issue such as free silver, was to be reckoned with. Often when unable to sway politicians on matters of party policy his appeal to the public brought result. He never permitted petty questions of an hour or a day or a locality to blind him to the main issue ever confronting the country. Right up to the last of his life he continued to reassert the issue. "On trifling events men frequently scatter in considerable numbers from the parties they commonly act with; but any event or proposition of real importance will bring them back" (November 15, 1909).

The long struggle for national unity was symbolic., the Editor used to say, of all democratic progress. A democracy, in finding its way, gropes in darkness of passion and ignorance, but finally by its own force, is sure to take the best way, yet most of the time because it exhausts all possible ways of going wrong. So with the unifying process in the Nation. "It takes a long time to teach a democracy anything—that is, any important principle. Tendency of democracy is to sub-divide. It is driven together only by large industrial and national forces, which it resists as long as it can. It took a great while to bring a scattered American democracy, planted in separate colonies, together in national unity; and the process required a bloody civil war perhaps the bloodiest in all history. It took a long time and strenuous effort and a financial catastrophe, among the worst the world ever has known, to cure the American democracy of the fallacy of trying to maintain a fictitious money standard. . . . It will solve the tariff question rightly after a while—that is, after it has tried every possible experiment of going wrong."

The reader should not infer that there was hostile spirit in Mr. Scott toward democracy; it was critical and philosophical, merely. No person could have been more intensely democratic in mind or habit. The professions of aristocracy, in politics or elsewhere, were to him abomination. Only in democracy did the sentiment of justice have full sway. "The spark of justice and the fires of human freedom are kept alive in the hearts of the common people, 'the plain people,' as Abraham Lincoln called them" (April 2, 1884). And "the most potent of all forces is democracy in its fighting mood" (December 20, 1905). Popular self-government was worth all its effort, however strenuous. It was the only security for freedom. Mr. Scott regarded as an urgent national need the great isthmian canal. Its unifying influence, he foresaw, would stimulate growth of the national spirit. He began writing on "The Darien Canal" in 1867. His discussions of the Panama and the Nicaragua and other routes were frequent. He believed that this waterway would consolidate the country and eradicate local narrowness even further than railroads have done. It would uplift America's world influence and upbuild America's sea power. The opportunity grasped by President Roosevelt for making this waterway American he commended as a grand stroke of statesmanship.

RIVAL DOCTRINES OF HAMILTON AND JEFFERSON

When the young Editor entered the post-bellum controversy, the leading Democratic organ in Portland was the Herald, whose editor in 1866 was Beriah Brown.^[12] This veteran of journalism undertook to discipline the "boy editor." But the "boy" proved himself more than a match for the "veteran." Their disputes brought out a subject on which Mr. Scott wrote with growing power the Jeffersonian origin of secession. Editor Brown, after the style of good Democrats, exalted the memory of Jefferson. Editor Scott dug up history to show Jefferson the architect of state sovereignty and rebellion; hostile to constitution and nationality; assertive of "Federal League"; author of Kentucky resolutions; sympathizer with the Whisky Insurrection and Shay's Rebellion; distrustful of courts and judiciary; covertly hostile to Washington. All this the young Editor suported with such array of reading as to spread wide his reputation. One of his terse and direct remarks (November 1, 1869) was the following: "It is now an accepted national and historical fact that the doctrines promulgated by Jefferson for partisan purposes, in opposition to the administration of Washington and the Elder Adams, were the fundamental cause of the Great Rebellion. In none has the maxim that the evil that men do lives after them been more fully illustrated than in the case of Thomas Jefferson." And near the end of his life the Editor outlined the same view as follows (February 23, 1909): "Jefferson was the man who, after the formation of the Constitution and the making of the nation under it, for partisan purposes, set up the claim that there was in fact no nation, no national government, but only a league of states, that might be abandoned or broken up by any of the members at will. This was the Great Rebellion. This was the Civil War. He was the evil genius of our national and political life."

Progress of the Hamilton idea, after its triumph in civil war, was often a theme of Mr. Scott's comments on current events. "The course of history during twenty years past (December 18, 1880) has vindicated Hamilton, demonstrated his marvelous prescience and discovered to the country the immense extent of its obligations to him. To Hamilton the country is chiefly indebted—to him it is indebted more than to all others—for the creation of a national government with sufficient power to maintain the national authority. He it was who, foreseeing the conflict between pretensions of state supremacy and the necessary powers of national authority, succeeded, in spite of tremendous opposition, in putting into the Constitution the vital forces which have sustained it. Appomattox was his victory. . . . The glory of Hamilton is the greatness of America." And on February 12, 1908, the same thought moved him to say: "The idea is growing that the Government of the United States is no longer a Government of limited powers but may cover all local conditions. This is a vindication of the principles of Hamilton against those of Jefferson." The fame of the Virginian, said Mr. Scott, will rest, in future history, on his acquisition of Louisiana and Oregon; this greatest of his works will fix him in history as the nation's chief expansionist. Acquisition of Louisiana was "the most important of all the facts of our history because it created the conditions necessary

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HARVEY W. SCOTT

AT SEASIDE, OREGON, IN THE SUMMER OF 19O5. HE WAS VERY FOND OF THE OCEAN BEACH AND IN LATER LIFE SPENT BRIEF PERIODS THERE. HE RECEIVED HIS NEWSPAPER FROM PORTLAND IN THE AFTERNOON AND READ IT EAGERLY

to our national expansion and consolidation." And after Louisiana came the United States claims to Oregon. "Philosophy of History" was a favorite pastime of Mr. Scott and he applied it in his later life to the main currents of United States history—Northern and Southern. On July 11, 1902, when introducing Henry Watterson^[13] at Gladstone, near Oregon City, he reviewed these two strains of national life in an address which awakened Mr. Watterson's admiration.

IXEXPANSION OF NATIONAL TERRITORY

The hew expansion across the Pacific following the Spanish War was, in Mr. Scott's opinion, a logical pursuit of national ends. It opened a new destiny for the American republic. It meant great national power at sea, and expansion of ocean commerce, leading to American dominion of the Pacific; "the nation's wider horizon is seaward" (July 12, 1898). It followed a law of constant expansion of territory—a law of national progress which had united the country and ever extended its frontier. It would prove anew the assimilating power of the American State; would broaden the country's spirit and its outlook on the world, because intercourse with other nations gives the most powerful stimulus to progress and no nation liveth unto itself alone. It would banish from home politics fallacies which would be generated otherwise out of American isolation; among such had been fiat money and absurdities of socialism. It would promote the growing leadership of America among the great powers. The Democratic Party was then fighting the changed policy, calling it "imperialism" and "militarism" and "government without consent of governed"—issues of Bryan from 1898 to 1904. Mr. Scott scored the opposition as an affront to American intelligence. These issues were false and unworthy of a political party which for generations had negatived them in domination of negroes in the South. Filipinos would not be "enslaved," as the Democratic Party asserted would be their fate under American rule, but would be accorded larger measure of political and personal freedom than they ever had before or could have under any other government. Even before the war with Spain, the Editor frequently told his readers that expansion was the rule of national life. "Neither races nor individuals change their 'nature and the laws of history cannot have fallen in sudden impotence in the nineteenth century (April 22, 1893). . . . We shall go on extending our limits, so long as the vital impulse of our nationality is not exhausted. When we lose the impulse to expand, it will be time for some other people to take the primacy of the Western Hemisphere out of our failing hands. "On October 8, 1898, when the war with Spain had delivered the Philippines to the United States, he wrote: "Men and ideas now leap oceans easier than they then (Washington's time) crossed rivers; and the notion that American ideas cannot pass beyond this continent is a strange short-sightedness, reserved fortunately, as we believe, to a small proportion of our people." The new destiny inspired him to appeal to the sentiment and fancy of his readers. When the National Editorial Association assembled in Portland in 1899, he welcomed the members in an address which outlined his conception of the new expansion as follows (July 6):

"The East has been treading on the heels of the West, yet never has overtaken it. Latterly, the West has taken ship on the Pacific, and, through one of the movements of history, has overtaken the East. America has put a new girdle around the earth; arid the West has moved on, till it has reached the gateway of the morning, over by the Orient where the men of the United States are planting the banners of a free civilization. . . . We are now making distant excursions, led thereto by a march of events, whose direction we could not foresee. But wherever we go we shall carry our great national idea, push it to realization and accomplish the great work of organizing into institutions the inalienable rights of man. . . . Realization that our country faces the Pacific as well as the Atlantic starts a new era of our national history, and, indeed, a hew epoch in the history of the world."

A decade after acquisition of the trans-Pacific islands the Editor was as ardent an expansionist as his forebears had been in spreading to Kentucky, Illinois and Oregon. On January 1, 1908, at the time of the round-the-world voyage of the American fleet, he said: "Every modern philosophical writer declares that the first grand discovery of modern times is the immense extension of the universe in space. The idea shows man where he is a'nd what he is. And the second great discovery is the immense and perhaps limitless extension of the universe in time. . . . It is with political geography that we are now immediately concerned. The Pacific Ocean is becoming more and more the theater of new interest for mankind. Here, on the American shore of this greatest of oceans, we face new movements and new destinies . . . Commercial movement and industrial forces depend always in great degree on political influences. With due regard for the rights of others, we want our just share—which is to be a large share—of the sovereignty of the Pacific."

XTARIFF, REVENUE AND "PROTECTION"

An ever-recurring question, vexing the country during most of Mr. Scott's period, even yet unsolved, was tariff. Nor could Mr. Scott see solution of the complicated matter in the near future. It may be fit here to outline his views on this subject, for he was consistently opposed to the long protective policy of the Republican Party, and the present protective policy of the Democratic Party. "Free trade" or "tariff for revenue only" belonged to his stock of "first principles"; "protection" was not a principle, at all; only a temporary policy and a deluded one. Never would the tariff be settled for any length of time until "protection" should be eliminated. The system is maintained, he said, because many localities, including Oregon, seek special advantages for themselves, aVid combine their forces to impose import tax for benefit of their own products—Oregon's being chiefly wool. All localities together are hostile to each neighbor's part of the spoil so that no protective tariff law can long exist. Such tariff, he used to say, will wreck the fortunes of any political party. As proofs we see the wreck of the Democratic Party after the Wilson bill of 1893 and recently the wreck of the Republican Party after the Payne-Aldrich act of 1909. He averred it is impossible to unite men long oh any protective tariff scheme because high moral enthusiasm, sentimental idea, are lacking. "The difficulty of uniting many men in permanent alliance for a common object," he asserted September 27, 1909, "increases as that object appeals less and less to any disinterested affection or high inspiration, and rapidly proves itself insuperable when it sinks into a mere scramble of greediness and vanity." A week earlier (September 20) he remarked: "It involves no contest of lofty opinions about justice or righteousness, the rights of democracy or the maintenance of the dignity or authority of the nation. It is trade and dicker, barter and swap."

The policy, declared Mr. Scott, takes wrongfully from one man to bestow upon another; thus confers special privilege. All cannot enjoy the benefits; a few do, and for those few the many, who have no products to "protect," are taxed. The rational tariff duty would be imposed on articles of universal consumption—food, drink and clothing—such as tea, coffee, tobacco, wine, spices, sugar and luxuries in high class textile, leather and metal goods and special luxuries of the rich. "The general principle of 'tariff for revenue only/ "he wrote, September 2, 1892, "is that we should admit free of duty, such commodities, except luxuries, as we produce in our own country and lay duties on such commodities of foreign production as we largely consume yet cannot, or do not, produce ourselves." Such settlement would put an end to the continuous brawl in Congress and throughout the country over the protection of one set of interests at the expense of others or at the expense of consumers. Anything short of it would leave the subject open to perpetual contention and strife; for protection was not an equal policy; never could be. Its most direct consequence were creation of monopolies and enrichment of a few at expense of the many. "Protection" conferred on manufactured goods yet denied to raw products, he said, was discrimination to which Western and agricultural communities would not submit. "Protection" had for its primary defense higher resultant wages for labor; but labor enters into production of raw materials just as into their manufacture.

It may be remembered that the Editor never was at peace with the Republican Party on tariff. Yet he could not quit the party on this issue, first because there was no other party whose policies he could accept and second, because more serious matters than tariff confronted the country arid in those matters only the Republican Party afforded him lodgment. Chief of them was the money question.

The Editor never regarded protective tariff as an enduring policy of the national Republican Party. He considered it a more natural one for the Democratic party, with its local habits. He believed, therefore, that the parties eventually would shift on this question, the Republican to champion tariff for revenue, the Democratic to advocate tariff for protection. "Tariff for revenue only/' he said August 8, 1909, "will become the demand of the North sooner than of the South. But there will be no result, these many years." Again: "As a party of national authority, the Republican Party will find the ideas of the local protectionists less and less suited to the policies for which it stands and must stand."

In the early '80's a common argument used for protective duties was that tariff would help maintain a "favorable balance of trade." This was too flimsy to withstand the editorial broadsides of Mr. Scott's writings. Thirty years later a fresh idea sprang up in defense of "protection" an adjustment of rates "based on difference in cost of production at home and abroad," so as to afford "protection" only to industries that really "needed" it. This was the last phase of tariff that Mr. Scott lived to attack. On April 6, 1910, he said: "It is impossible to ascertain the differences between the cost of production here and abroad. Variations of opinion on this subject will be irreconcilable and endless. . . . The differences will shift and vary continually. None of these differences is or ever will be, a fixed quantity or a steady quantity for any length of time. . . . New factors are continually entering into all processes of manufacture; and cost of materials varies from year to year. Cost of production, being extremely unstable abroad, how can it ever become a basis on which protective tariff laws can be framed for our country?" Beginning in 1880 "reciprocity" was a frequent subject of discussion and legislation. By this policy, the United States was to admit certain goods of certain other nations, if such nations would admit certain goods of the United States. The scheme never attained much success, owing largely to American Unwillingness to lift tariff on favored articles. Mr. Scott said that reciprocity was incompatible with protection. "You never suspect that reciprocity is sincere, when you look at its advocates. They never reciprocate except for their own gain at somebody else's loss." (January 19, 1902.)

XI CHINESE EXCLUSION

At two periods, Mr. Scott's firm stand for law and order and his unsparing denunciation of disturbers of peace evoked bitter resentment and even mob excitement—in 1880-86, when Chinese suffered violent attacks, and in 1894, when "Coxey Armies" were "mustering" and "marching" on Washington City. In each case the Editor's English denounced the exciters and the doers of violence, in his most vigorous style. Threats were often heard against his life atid he deemed it prudent to guard his newspaper office against any possible assault. Labor agitators were foremost in these crises and they were greatly exercised by the Editor's criticism of their doctrines of labor; for Mr. Scott, through his long experience as a laborer, had learned lessons of industry which enabled him to put up effectual arguments against their claims and theories and to drive home his arguments by his own example.

Mr. Scott always held the Chinese an undesirable infusion into American population, yet useful for menial labor. He opposed forceful ejectment of them from the United States, but supported the plan of exclusion, which in 1882 was enacted into law. Under treaty of 1868 with China, immigrants from that country were guaranteed free ingress into the United States. This treaty held until 1880, when a new one gave this country the privilege of regulating this immigration. An exclusion act of Congress in 1879 was vetoed by President Hayes, because violating the treaty of 1868. Finally in 1882 exclusion was effected by an act which has been continued up to the present time.

There is little doubt that refusal of the United States to admit hordes of Chinese laborers has been best for the internal peace of the nation, although the Pacific Coast region has suffered thereby for lack of efficient laborers. Mr. Scott clearly foresaw both the social need of exclusion and the industrial need of Chinese labor on the Pacific Coast. The former need he regarded as the determining one. The immediate theme of his writings during the critical time of anti-Chinese agitation was the treaty rights of Chinese in this country to protection against mob violence. He condemned in unsparing terms the cruel attacks made upon them by agitators and mobs, whose cry was "The Chinese must go!" He pointed out that attacks upon the persons of the alien residents would involve the United States in international complications with China and bring discredit upon this country among foreign nations. He declared that industrious Americans had nothing to fear from the labor competition of Chinese. The crusade against Chinese was general in the Pacific Coast in 1880-90, and in several places the aliens suffered sorely, as in San Francisco and Tacoma. Portland had less disturbance than other cities of the Coast—in which Mr. Scott both bespoke and guided the temper of his city.

During more than thirty years and from his first to his last utterances on the Chinese question, Mr. Scott insisted that the problem was not one of labor, but of race. It was neither true nor important that Chinese were doing work that white men otherwise would do, or taking "jobs" away from American citizens. The real objection to them was that they were not an assimilable element; could not fuse with the white population; in other words, race antipathy existed which was not to be overcome by argument and which would cause discord and continual upset in the political and social body. In 1869, the Editor pointed out that labor wages here—then about fifty per cent higher than east of the Mississippi—would be reduced not by Chinese at that time few in number, but by influx of workers from our own denser populated part of the country.

White immigration was thereafter agumented in California by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, that year completed, and in Oregon by large expenditure of money for railroads by Ben Holladay. In that same year politicians in Oregon, as well as in California, were making campaign against "Chinese cheap labor," among them Grover,^[14] then running first time for Governor. Against their assertion that Chinese "add nothing to the wealth of the country," Mr. Scott showed that the aliens had cleared large land areas for crops and were building railroads for use of the white population. Their number on the Pacific Coast less than forty thousand, and few in Oregon was, as yet, no menace to the white race and was contributing large capital, by its labor, to the uses of the country. "Every Chinaman leaves the products of his labor, a full equivalent for the wages paid him. He leaves more; he leaves the profit which his employer has made in the cheap labor he has furnished" (July 7, 1869). Often Mr. Scott told the white people that the Pacific Coast was slow in industrial progress because there were not enough workers; that Chinese were not snatching places from white men because they were doing work white men would not do; that the surfeit of white laborers in San Francisco, the center of agitation, did not exist elsewhere and that most of the work to be performed was outside the cities; that the aliens had done much to make Oregon and Washington habitable for white men, especially in clearing land a work too hard and cheap for white laborers; that they had been employed in this and other activities also because of scarcity and indolence of the whites.

But the Editor was prompt also to say that while Chinese were useful for labor, they could not be received in large numbers into American citizenship; that the two races were antagohistic, ethnically, politically, industrially. He asserted that however much Chinese industry would stimulate growth of the country, it was better to have peace. "They are not an assimilable element and they come in contact with our people in a way which cannot in the large run be favorable either to morals or prosperity. . . . Under this view we have believed it well

HARVEY W. SCOTT AT 70 YEARS OF AGE

to pass a bill to restrict Chinese immigration" (March 21, 1879). On enactment of the exclusion law in 1882, he said (April 29): "The Pacific States have made a great fight and have won a great victory."

In 1905 Chinese in the Orient boycotted American goods because of the exclusion law and many exporters in the United States urged suspension of the exclusion law. The Chamber of Commerce of Portland recommended admission of a limited number of Chinese annually. This plan Mr. Scott opposed with citations from experience of twenty-five years before. Other matters were to be taken into account, he said, than exports and need of laborers. "We can never expect (August 18, 1905) that our laboring classes will assume any position except of unconquerable antagonism toward the Chinese. The history of every community on the Pacific Coast for the past thirty years proves it."

(July 5, 1905): "No conflict is so cruel as that between antagonistic races. ... No doubt Chinese laborers in this country would quicken Industries now dormant for want of hands to stir them. But how about politics? How about the race conflict? Do you want it? The Oregonian has a memory and it does not."

(July 22, 1905): "The commotion would be so great that it may be doubted whether, on the whole, the progress of the country would not be checked, rather than accelerated, even in ah industrial way."

(July 6, 1905): "The Chinese could do a lot of work here, of course—and work a lot of trouble. We want industrial development, but we want peace and must not have race war."

Inasmuch as Mr. Scott's opposition to Chinese expulsion has led some persons to suppose that he also resisted Chinese exclusion, it has seemed to the present writer appropriate to set forth Mr. Scott's attitude on this subject in some detail. The Editor understood the problem as many others did not—its native antipathies, its basic race hatreds. Therefore, he was equipped to deal with the subject according to "first principles" and moral precepts. His course was humane, rational and consistent and vindicated by subsequent events. It was a very difficult question to handle in the then heated condition of the public mind, especially in 1886 when expulsion was demanded. All are now ready to deprecate assaults upon Chinese but denunciation of such acts twenty-five years ago excited bitterest animosities, with attacks of malignity and folly. The spirit of riot and outrage, of incendiarism, robbery and midnight assault assailed the Chinese during a decade.

XII "COXEY ARMIES"

The other period of turbulence was that of "Coxey Armies" in March and April, 1894. "Hard times" and the worst stagnation in business the country ever knew, followed the collapse of 1893. Loud clamor went up from the unemployed for work. The noise was heightened by a large element of the thriftless, who having saved nothing from "good times," turned agitators and even vagabonds and called upon government for the means of livelihood. They organized "armies" which set out for Washington, D. C, to lay their "grievances" before Congress and to demand "aid." The movement was started by Jacob S. Coxey, of Massillon, Ohio, and was encouraged by the Populist political party and by many followers of fiat money. Chief of the Coxey demands were free silver coinage and immediate issue of $500,000,000 greenbacks, unsecured, wherewith to employ the "army" on road building which, if done, would have plunged the nation into the lowest depths of currency degradation and industrial chaos. The commonweal parties started from many directions and but few reached the National Capital. Coxey himself was arrested there for breaking the rule, "Keep off the grass." The travelers had no means to pay for food, clothing or passage and the mania made them hostile to work; therefore they first imposed themselves on charity and then resorted to thievery and even to capture of railroad trains. Governor Pennoyer of Oregon afforded them sympathy, thereby increasing the local tension. Oregon became a hotbed of Coxey propaganda, and United States officers were called upon to protect railroad traffic from interference.

If the reader has followed the outline of Mr. Scott's personal character and editorial style, as hitherto given, he can foresee, before reaching these lines, the war which the Editor waged upon the Coxey movement. He told the "armies" that their resources were not in government but in their own labors; that they would have to take what employment they could get and at whatever wages and that the government did not owe them better nor any at all; that in Oregon and Washington was place for every efficient man on farm, in garden and orchard and dairy, in mine and forest, on terms that would enable him both to live and to convert the tattered prodigal and aimless vagrant into useful, prosperous and honored citizens; that it was the business of every person to strive to make place for himself instead of to complain, "No man hath hired us"; that the Coxey leaders were professional agitators and the followers deadbeats and prodigals. The "armies" were similar to the "I. W. W." groups of the present day, which have been defying law, order and industry, and laying their grievances to capitalism. Mr. Scott viewed the "Coxeyites" as belonging to the ultra-radical forces of socialism. His disbelief in "community help" for the individual and his faith in personal industry and prudence fired his utterances with a fervor which angered the "Oregon army." A mob of Coxeyites in May, 1894, surrounded The Oregonian building for several hour's calling for vengeance. In answer to their plaint, "We are starving in the midst of plenty. Why?" Mr. Scott had answered (April 21, 1894):

"It is easy to tell why. For years there had been plenty of work and high wages. But these men did not make the most of their opportunities. Some of them did not use their opportunities at all. Those who did work worked but fitfully or irregularly and did not save their money. They 'blew it in.' They refused the maxims and the practice of prudence, sobriety and economy. They were careless, pleasure-seeking, improvident. And though they were getting the best wages ever paid, they were dissatisfied and wanted more. Through their unions they forced their demands for wages to a point beyond the power of employers to pay. Their political demagogues told them they ought to get still more, that they were cheated out of all the benefits of 'protection/ which were intended for them, but had been swallowed up by the bosses. So the 'change' was voted. This produced increased caution and timidity on the part of employers, who feared to continue their business on the old scale, and, in fact, were unable to do so. Then, when employment could ho longer be had, great numbers of these men, who had saved nothing, found themselves destitute and forthwith began to accuse and denounce society and government for conditions resulting from their own imprudence. . . . It is not In the power of the national authorities to find remedies for the evils which men bring on themselves through want of forethought and steady industry, through dissipation of time, opportunity and money, through the common modern habit of pushing the demand for wages beyond what employers can possibly afford to pay and compelling establishments to close or greatly reduce their force. . . . They who spend their money in one way or another as fast as they make it, who never postpone present gratification to the expectation and purpose of future advantage, who live in and for the passing day, with little thought of the morrow, and none at all of next year, or of the necessary provision for later life; who have been accustomed to work, when they worked at all, only at such employments and such hours and wages as they could select or dictate; whose lives in many instances have been as profligate as that of the prodigal son, but who have not yet reached the better resolve of repentance and amendment all such are stranded, of course. These are fit recruits for the armies of vagrancy now pointed toward Washington by the demagogue folly which has long been proclaiming it to be the duty and within the power of Congress to help men by legislation who can be helped only by themselves."

As this quotation describes Mr. Scott's ideas of individual thrift, it has been included here at some length. While there might be an occasional exception to the general rule that a man's success or failure in life is what he himself makes it, Mr. Scott averred that the exceptions could not disprove the rule. With men as a class and with individuals who failed to build a foundation of personal prosperity, he had little or no sympathy. He did feel, however, and most deeply, for children in destitution. Their helplessness was always a source of sadness to him. In June, 1894, a railroad strike halted Mr. Scott's return from an Eastern trip, at Tacoma, and he had to quit the Northern Pacific Railroad there, and make his way as best he could to Portland. This amused a number of Populist editors and they directed jibes at Mr. Scott, which he answered with the following in The Oregonian of July 24:

"Several Populist papers are chuckling and cackling over the fact that some two weeks ago the Editor of The Oregonian, then at Puget Sound on business, was stopped at Tacoma by the strike and had to make his way as he could across the country to the Columbia River. Of course the poor milksops do not know how little such an incident disturbs a man who all his life has been accustomed to obstacles, and yet never to allow them to stand in his way. The Editor of The Oregonian in pioneer times was accustomed to foot it between Puget Sound and the Columbia and carry his grub and blankets on his back, and to think nothing of it. He and all others at that day went through without complaint conditions a thousand-fold more laborious and difficult than those against which our Populists and anarchists and 'cultus' people generally now protest as intolerable hardship and grinding slavery. Trifling as this particular incident is, it illustrates right well the difference between purposeful energy and poor, pitiful inefficiency. The one does things, the other whines and complains, says it can't, and wants somebody to help, or government to give it a lift."

In December of the same year, when "soup kitchens" were abundant, Mr. Scott had said in his paper: "It is their duty to put their wits and energies at work, to make employment for themselves, not to stand all the day idle offering the excuse that no man has hired us." A critical editor replied that he would like to see what Mr. Scott would do, "out of money and out of work and without friends." To which Mr. Scott answered in The Oregonian, December 23, 1894:

"He was in exactly that position m Portland over 40 years ago. But he didn't stand round and whine, nor look for resources in political agitation or bogus money nor join Coxey's army. He struck out for the country, dug a farmer's potatoes, milked the cows and built fences for his food and slept in a shed; got a job of rail-splitting abd took his pay in an order for a pair of cowhide boots; in these boots he trudged afoot to Puget Sound; "rustled" there for three years and raked together $70, with which he came back to Oregon afoot, to go to school, and managed by close economy to live six months, till, his last dollar having vanished, he bought an ax of Tom Charman, of Oregon City, on credit, made himself a camp on the hill above Oregon City and cut cordwood till he got a little money to pay debts he owed for books arid clothes. The next years were spent very much the same way—hard work and hard study, but nothing for beer and tobacco, and no time fooled away listening to political demagogues. All this is very commonplace, but it is recited to show that when the editor of this newspaper talks about hard times, self-help and what men can do, he knows what he is talking about."

XIIIINDIVIDUALISM

None knew better than Mr. Scott the irresistible drift toward substitution of collective function for personal duty. He stemmed the drift as only his strong personality could do, yet not nearly so often as his conscience urged. He insisted that citizens should supply, as far as society could compel them, their own facilities and luxuries for selves and children, without leaning on government. Otherwise character would be impaired and the many would be burdened on the thrifty few, with the former quota fast growing. Always he was urging his readers to employ energies of the self-reliant aforetime and apply themselves to creative labor, instead of to seek the created wealth of others. Pioneer conditions, he used to say, were a thousand times harder than the later conditions that were called "oppressive" and "grinding" by many a poor man. The contrast between the pioneer era of self-help and the new era of leaning on society he portrayed in the subjoined article, March 1, 1884:

"Our fathers, who settled and subdued the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, pursued the rational and successful way. Each family pushed out for itself, without theories to hamper it. All worked with intelligence and industry, but no one leaned upon another. The theories of modern social science, so-called, fortunately for them and for the country, were unknown. Its jargon had not yet been evolved to mystify the mind, to darken counsel, to suggest falsely that men might look for resources where no resources are to be found. Our fathers knew that the secret lay in independent energy, in intelligent labor, in the rules of thrift, economy and virtue. They knew that the thing for each family to do was to make a selection of land and establish upon it an independent home. There were no writings of Herbert Spencer or Henry George to perplex them with vain notions of co-operative association or other transcendental nonsense. Enough for each of them to mind his own business, without bothering with co-operation, colony or commonwealth. On those principles of common sense our own state was settled."

INDIVIDUALISM IN MORALS

It is convenient to discuss the general attitude of Mr. Scott on the large questions involved i'n "individual responsibility" under two main heads moral and economic. Under the former are classed his articles on reform, liquor prohibition, temptation and the like; under the latter his varied discussion nowadays presented by "socialization" projects. No subjects received more frequent treatment at his pen than these and none other were challenged more hotly by champions of opposing ideas. They cover the whole period of his activity. They were widely read and applauded; also widely misunderstood and misrepresented.

Starting with the idea that each individual should be held accountable for his own evil conduct and should suffer its consequences, Mr. Scott declared this method the only one fit to fortify the resistant forces of personal character. Only moral strength would withstand temptation and such strength is acquired from resistance. Temptation, therefore, was not to be taken away. "It is poor and impotent method of reforming the world," he remarked September 30, 1887, "to try to put away means of evil from men, instead of teaching men to put evil away from themselves. Temptation exists in forms innumerable and will ever exist, so long as man is man; and our Maker himself appears to have seen no other way to develop a moral nature in man but by setting temptation before him and bidding him, as he valued life, to triumph over it. ... The text is, 'Deliver us from evil.' It is a mistaken method of moral work when the text is reversed and men think, by putting temptation out of the way, or by trying to remove from sight things that may be perverted, to make moral character." Again on December 28, 1909: "If any philosopher or if the philosopher is to be ruled out if any charlatan or quack can discover a way by which temptation can be resisted or character can be formed except in the presence of temptation, he will be a world's wonder. The problem was beyond Omniscience and Omnipotence."

Drunkards are to blame for their excess, not the person selling the liquor; nor the law which fails to suppress it; drinkers create the saloon by their demand for it. The one way to diminish the liquor traffic is to diminish the demand. Intemperance is in the man, not in the whisky. It is not the fallen woman who is responsible for the social evil, but the men who seek her. It is not the "keeper of the game" who is responsible for the evils of gambling but the persons whose demand creates the game and supports it. It is not the "loan shark" who is responsible for usury but the persons who seek to pay excessive interest. Those who stray from the strict moral code of sex are not to blame other influences than their own weakness. Parents whose children go wrong are to hold responsible nothing else than their own neglect or failure of training. Morally weak persons who fail to hold themselves erect should pay the penalty, either in punishment or elimination. "This poor fellow can't resist the seductions of drink (October 7, 1887); that poor fellow can't resist the seductions of the painted woman; the other poor fellow can't resist the seductions of the gaming table. And all of these poor fellows are a cheap lot, none of them worth saving and the world would be better without them." All this was a grim rule of conduct, yet it accorded, he said, with the world's experience. It did not mean that society was to fail to protect its weak members against the aggressions of the strong. "But it cannot protect the weak against themselves without trenching on the rights of free action (May 24,

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Facsimile of writing of Harvey W. Scott. From manuscript of an address delivered by Mr. Scott at Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, N. Y., Sept. 25, 1901 (Oregon Day). "The Oregon Country, when my father removed his family to it, forty-nine years ago, embraced the country from the summit of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, between the 426 and 49th parallels of latitude. It included the whole of three" states of the present day and large parts of two more.

1904), through which the strong grow stronger and find a freedom that makes life worth living. . . . It remains as heretofore and will be the law of the life of man to the last ages, that those who cannot stand the strain and pressure of moral requirements will perish."

Legislation, he averred, has little effect on morals or character. Rum, brandy, whisky, for example, always will exist. They belong to the domain of human knowledge. To try to suppress the knowledge is absurd. "All that can be done rationally is to teach, or try to teach, the error of misuse of them (May 2, 1909). Restraint of sale is well. Still, however, there must be left some quantity of choice in the use of them even in the abuse of them. This is absolute. It gives the reason why prohibition never can be enforced." Indians of Oregon, before whites came to the country, knew nothing of alcoholic liquors. "But had they the virtue of 'temperance?' Not at all. Though they never got drunk, temperance was a virtue they did not know. . . . Those who think that by prohibiting liquor they can make men temperate are as absurd as those who suppose that they can make men honest by never trusting them with anything they can steal. Moral strength is created only by allowing liberty of choice between right and wrong; by marking the difference between right use of a thing and actual abuse of it. All other miseries in the world are insignificant as compared with those that attend abuse of the sexual function. But does the genuine reformer endeavor to abolish the sexual relation? Rather does he not insist that one of the chief duties of life is to refrain from abuse of it?" (September 2, 1889.)

Often the critics of Mr. Scott urged that since the law forbids theft and murder, makes their acts crimes and punishes them with severity, the law can also forbid liquor selling, make it a crime, and enforce penalties for its violation. Mr. Scott replied that murder and theft are crimes per se and so regarded the world over; but liquor selling is sanctioned by public opinion because men recognize a proper and sober use of liquors. Reform of vice, in the Editor's view, rests with those who have the training of youth; with those who can exert personal and social influence to put vice under the ban. Virtue must have its growth from within; cannot be enforced from without. Training, if not in the home, is impossible. Mr. Scott deprecated the modern habit of shifting this duty to the state. "All the duties of society (December 11, 1907), all the duties of the State as the authoritative expression of the means and measures necessary for the regulation of society are of little importance in proportion to the duties of parenthood; for everything depends on the watchfulness of parents and on their right care and direction of the children for whom they are responsible." He always resented ecclesiastical control or discipline of private conduct, resisted the pratings of "pharasaic and charlatan proprietors of civic virtue" and of revivalist reformers, drew distinctions between innocent pleasures (as on Sunday) and theocratic condemnation of such pleasures as vices; decried the efforts of Pinchbeck or Puritan moralists, rebuffed "shrieky preachers" who sought to force their sensational ideas on him or on the public. His was a middle course between the extremes of vice and the extremes of reform, a course which he deemed practicable and therefore sensible.

INDIVIDUALISM IN INDUSTRY

Most important of all parental teaching for the youth is that of work and concentration, wrote the Editor often. Industry is first among the influences of right living. Constant labor, applied to intelligent purpose, opens the way to good practices and closes the paths of evil; also it trains to self-denial and self-control. "This self-denial of which so many are impatient (April 7, 1899) is no new doctrine; it contains a universal principle that can never be suspended; the exercise of it is, always has been, always must be, a fundamental condition of success in human life."

Mr. Scott was ever driving home the lesson that there is no considerable success without great labor and they who decline the labor have no right to expect the results that come only through labor. Young people are not to shun even drudgery, for it is the price of success and worth the price. "Voluntary hard labor has always had a hard name among those not willing to undergo it (April 7, 1899). 'Improbus' it was called far back an expression not translatable as applied to labor, in accord with the ideas of the modern world. It is common enough to say that success is not worth such extreme effort; which would be true enough, if only material objects were considered, but the full exercise of every man's powers is due to himself and due to the world, subordinate always to the rule of right. The one thing that needs iteration is that no success can rightfully be effected without payment of the price for it in labor and conduct." Moreover, "the young man who is to get on in the world (September 6, 1904) 'needs to work the most days and the most hours he can not the fewest. There never will be reversal nor suspension of this rule. The few who observe it will get on, will get ahead. The many who neglect it will be servants while they live." Men's duty seldom permits them to choose their occupations. If every man could have the work he delights in doing, much work would go undone. Labor is the only means to happiness; efforts to escape it end miserably; physical comfort does not always lead to virtue; there is no reward for idlers; economy is a very great revenue; government can do little to "help" its people or provide them work; no man need suffer poverty in the bountiful opportunities Oregon affords; self-help is the only means of escape from the wages system—such were frequent themes in Mr. Scott's editorial discussions.

No rules for getting on in the world are worth much, beyond the rules that inculcate the homely and steady virtues. "All else will be controlled largely by circumstance (January 28, 1910). A man of fair abilities, good judgment and powers of unceasing application, may become moderately successful in any line of effort to which he turns his attention. But sobriety, prudence, industry and judgment must attend him every day of his life." A year earlier, January 7, 1909: "Attention to business, whether it be sweeping out and making fires in a little store or shop or helping to load coal on a freight engine, will land one at the top—but the three simple words at the beginning of the sentence cover a multitude of things that the average boy slights as not worth bothering himself about." As for college education: "Everything is in the man; little in the school (July 5, 1909). If it is in the mah it will work its way out—school or no school. Talent is irrepressible. It will find its way. If it hasn't energy to find its way, it will accomplish little from all the boosting it may receive." Thus the Editor summarized his slight faith in "easy" education. Again: "Boys and girls! You've got to work, and your school will help mighty little. The less help you have the stronger you'll be—if there's anything in you. If there's nothing in you, the game isn't worth the candle. But you must try."

Mr. Scott's own rule of life, his own self-examination and fortitude of character are indicated in this analysis of what true worth is, as distinguished from wealth or station or intellectual capacity (April 7, 1899):

"A man's greatness lies not in wealth or station, as the vulgar believe, nor yet in intellectual capacity, which often is associated with the meanest character, the most abject servility to those in high places and arrogance to the poor and lowly; but a man's true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, oh frequent self-examination—for Socrates has not been superseded on this topic nor ever will be—and on a steady obedience to the rule that he knows to be right, without troubling himself very much about what others may think or say or whether they do or do not do that which he thinks and says and does. The prime principle in man's constitution is the social; but independent character is the rational check upon its tendency to deception, error and success."

Devotion to truth was a vital corollary to his moral theorem of industry. "The straight path," he often said, "is the old and only way." On March 25, 1905: "The only security one has, or can have, when he enters the world of activity and of strife and struggles with it, is in keeping faith with his ideals. Starvation, with virtue, after all, is not likely to happen. But shame, failure, vexation, disappointment, remorse and death are the proper consequences of life, without ideals of virtue and duty. There are resources in decency and virtue and right living, that are sure. To these resources, loose, vicious and idle lives never can pretend. If the straight way is not the primrose path, it certainly is the only safe one."

XIV SOCIALISM: ANALYSIS OF ITS DOCTRINES

The motives spurring the Editor against the oncoming hosts of paternalism already have been outlined in this article. He thought the rising power of collectivism and communism, unless checked by later forces, ultimately would submerge the energetic, the thrifty members of society. Immediately it was bringing vastly extended functions of government, multiplied office-holders and "free" enjoyments for the masses that pay little or no part of the expense in taxes and that control taxation through non-propertied suffrage. Socialism, he defined as the negation of all private property, since equality is the essence of all its doctrines; as "the growing disposition to substitute communism for individualism, an increasing desire to use the State as a vehicle for support of the thriftless, by levying upon the accumulation of the thrifty; an increasing antagonism to the man who through patience, energy and self-denial, accumulates, and an increasing encouragement to the incompetent to rely upon society as a whole for sustenance and even entertainment" (April 15, 1901). Again: "It implies that industry, prudence, temperance and thrift should divide their earnings with indolence, stupidity, imprudence, intemperance and consequent poverty" (March 10, 1892). Once more: "It means that the state, or the community in general, is to be the collective owner of all the instruments of production and transport—by instruments meaning all things requisite, including land, to produce and to circulate commodities. That is to say, the state is to own all things which economists call capital—all the land, all factories, workshops, warehouses, machinery, plant, appliances, railways, rolling stock, ships, etc." (July 9, 1895).

This definition excited hostile criticism of varied degree from socialists, who would flood the editorial table with copious letters defining socialism each for himself. "Every writer," replied Mr. Scott (April 15, 1901), "has his own definition. Some go no farther than general opposition to private ownership of land and productive plants. Some go so far as the platform of the Social Democratic Party in 1900, which demands public ownership not only of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, water works, gas and electric plants and public utilities generally, but also of all mines, oil and gas wells. Some advocate community ownership of all desirable things, including women." Mr. Scott admitted that the negation of the idea of private property is not the intent of socialism, but averred that such would be the logical and inevitable result, because no property could be used as a private source of income and because personal goods would soon wear out and could not be renewed, since the state would possess the means of production. Hence, there would be no way to acquire property beyond the barest means and needs of living and no person could have more or better things than his neighbor. "It is astonishing that this scheme to narrow human life to one type, and that the poorest, should have any support at all. It would be useless for anyone to make effort, for he would have nothing to gain for himself and nothing to leave to descendants" (November 22, 1904). Once when a socialist writer called civilization a "monstrous disease," Mr. Scott retorted (December 17, 1907): "It may be supposed the writer never saw uncivilized conditions, such, for example, as those in which the tribes of Clatsop and Puget Sound lived, in the former day. That state of life seemed to be a real disease."

SPREAD OF GOVERNMENTAL FUNCTION

We cannot epitomize the whole range of argument which Mr. Scott employed against socialism, nor does space permit. His articles on this ramified subject cover more than thirty years. He knew he could stop the then forward march of the idea not at all nor retard it even slightly. It would have to run its course, he said. In concrete practice, Mr. Scott resisted the idea in its continuous enlargement of governmental function. He declared that public ownership of complicated utilities, such as lighting plants, street car lines, would prove more costly than in private hands under government regulation; that extension of higher education to make it "free" and "easy" injured the recipients of its so-called benefits, absolved parents from their due obligations and youth from helpful striving; that "free" libraries, hospitals and many other "free" luxuries fostered official extravagance bred officials and taxed the most energetic citizens for benefit of those of lesser merit; that worst of all it taught the habit of "lying down on the government" and "making the state pay." "Government cannot compel the energetic few to do very much for the improvident many" (June 7, 1909). "If pushed very far, the result will be continual and rapid diminution of the energetic few and increase of the improvident many." Again on June 20, 1904: "The dream of 'social justice' never will do anything for him who depends on it. He should quit that dream, take the first job he can get and stick to it till he can make it the stepping stone to another and better. Then he will find no theory of 'social justice' of any interest to him." An earlier article, November 18, 1889, remarked: "No man has ever yet risen to prosperity by croaking and grumbling and spending his time in trying to discover reasons for the supposition that society is organized to keep him down." As for spread of governmental function (February 1, 1901): "Nobody can look out for himself any more. He is no longer able to cut his beard without superintendence by the state or to buy butter for his table or to protect his fruit from winged or creeping pests or his flocks from wild beasts. No one now thinks of doing anything for his own education; and the citizen puts up an incessant demand for enlargement of the functions of the state in all conceivable ways, so he may 'get a job,' in which the duty is but nominal and the salary secure." The great source of trouble was too much ignorant and irresponsible voting of taxes and governmental extravagance by citizens who did not feel the burdens thereby imposed on property. For this reason—and this reason chiefly—Mr. Scott stood opposed to woman suffrage—which would double, or more than double, he said, this sort of voters. Government and property, he asserted, were too much harassed by such voters already.

SINGLE TAX ON LAND

Land socialism—"single tax"—Mr. Scott treated in ways similar to other doctrines of communism, as a scheme of its advocates to prey upon propertied neighbors through authority of government. His writings on this subject extended over twenty-four years. They contain the full argument against the theories of Henry George and his later followers. A characteristic excerpt of his criticism is the following (July 20, 1909):

"Our Henry George aspostles or disciples, the single-taxers, who call themselves the landless poor, will not rush off into any of the new districts, where land is offered practically free and settle down and work in solitude and contentment, as others did aforetime to establish themselves and their families. No, indeed! They wish to seize the fruits of the labor and privation and waiting and life-long effort and industry of others—by throwing all taxes on land values and making the land obtained by the pioneers, through their early efforts and life-long constancy—valueless to them. Here, in the new aspect are the modern Huns and Vandals. * * * These people don't wish to work, are unwilling to work, as others have done aforetime. They think it easier and therefore preferable to prey on society and rob others covering their operations with assertions of justice and forms of law."

XVEVILS OF LARGE WEALTH

Evils of excessive wealth, glaring as they were and intolerable, were not to be remedied, said Mr. Scott, by the socialistic regime. He considered the propaganda formidable chiefly as "part of the attack on vast evils that must be cured or abated" (November 12, 1906). Not forever would the people allow themselves to be plundered by trust combinations. "Such transactions in themselves and in their results, are all immoral. They are on a level with the transactions of the slave trade; and their fortunes have the same basis (April 7, 1905)." It was a lazy complacency which assumed that the masses of the

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GEORGE H. WILLIAMS AND HARVEY W. SCOTT

AT LEWIS AND CLARK FAIR GROUNDS AT PORTLAND IN MAY, 1904. JUDGE WILLIAMS WAS 81 YEARS OF AGE, MR. SCOTT 66 YEARS

people should submit to these exactions and yield to the "stream of tendency." Colossal combinations organized for such business are inconsistent with principles of social and individual freedom. "Our people will not believe that the long upward struggle of the civilized world for centuries, tending ever to greater freedom of the individual, larger sense of personal dignity and independence, is to be arrested now or to end now in the economic overlordship of a few and the contented acceptance by all the rest, of such favors in the form of charities or educational endowments as these few may see fit to bestow." July 18, 1903.) And the system of perpetuating vast fortunes by inheritance made the evils worse. These estates should be broken up, he said, not be permitted to solidify into permanent institutions. The power of transmitting such estates was sure to be limited. And there should be abolition of protective tariff greatest agency of special privilege; also close regulation of avenues of transport and carriage. Socialism or social democracy was unthinkable, as a remedy. It would be inconsistent with individual freedom and personal dignity; an economic impossibility; a despotism. "Great wealth" could be regulated under existing institutions and forms of law. The whole system of private property should not be destroyed in the effort to eradicate the parasite.

XVI THE "OREGON SYSTEM"

In 1904 the initiative and referendum became operative in Oregon and in 1905 the direct primary. The method of direct legislation and direct nomination became known as the "Oregon system." In successive elections the "system" was actively employed. Mr. Scott was its boldest critic. He was widely urged to turn the system to his own use to elect himself United States Senator in 1906-08. These urgings were so numerous and came from such substantial sources that they convinced his friends he could make a successful contest for the office. But they could not move him to approve the system; it was destructive of party and of the representative and cohesive forces of government. He would not pose as a seeker of any office, however high, against his convictions. He predicted that the system would break up the Republican party then dominant in registration by large majority and would elect Democrats to the chief offices. His predictions were amply verified, for Oregon has two Democratic Senators at the National Capitol and a Democratic Governor, whereas Republican registered voters have outnumbered Democratic in the state during eight years past by more than three to one. He asserted that the "Oregon system" was reversion to pure democracy and destructive of the centralizing and nationalizing institutions of representative government.

Mr. Scott directed his heaviest batteries against "Statement One"—a pledge required of candidates for the Legislature, binding them to elect the "people's choice" for United States Senator, of the general election. The Editor scored this pledge as disruptive of party, as an instrument of petty factionalism, and false pretenses, as a "trap" to force Republican Legislators to elect Democratic Senators against their own political convictions and agamst heavy Republican majorities on national issues. By this "trap" Mr. Chamberlain was elected Senator in 1909 and Mr. Lane in 1913, both Democrats. "Statement One" is now eliminated by amendment to the national constitution for election of Senators by popular vote—which Mr. Scott often urged both as an escape from Oregon's troublesome method and from the evil methods in other states. "The election should be placed by the constitution directly in the hands of the people of each of the states, without intervention of the Legislature thereof (January 27, 1908). It is one of the absolute needs of our government." Statement One certainly proved itself a destructive instrument to Republican unity and a boon to Democrats.

As for direct primaries, Mr. Scott conceded their benefits in eradicating the "boss" and the "machine" convention, but held up the evils—such as, loss of leadership of strongest meto, plurality rule of parties and their resultant disintegration; elimination of purposeful party effort; false registration of members of party; spites and revenges of factionalism; bold self-seeking of candidates for office. Mr. Scott's remedy was an adjustment between the old and the new systems—party conventions prior to primaries, the platform and candidates of the former to be submitted to the latter. This plan he was urging at the time of his death. It was rejected in the subsequent election by defeat of the convention candidates. It may be remarked in passing that even the original advocates of direct primaries in Oregon are not all favorable to continuance of the system. They admit the unsatisfactory results and now urge "preference voting," whereby primaries would be abolished and nominations and elections consolidated.

Mr. Scott objected not so much to the referendum as to the initiative. Both,, he pointed out, were designed for occasional or emergency use, but the initiative had opened the way to innovators, faddists and agitators, who took the opportunity to inflict their notions upon legislation at every election. The initiative, open as in Oregon to such small percentage of electors, was leading to visionary extremes and—what was most serious—to unequal taxation. It was a menace to political peace and security which could not be long tolerated by conservative elements of the people. It was supplanting representative government—the best known method of democratic cohesion and safest means of protection for property. It was superseding the old Oregon constitution—a wisely framed instrument. It was reverting to "pure democracy" which history had proved inferior to republican form of government. "Representative government is the only barrier between anarchy and despotic monarchy. The whole people cannot take the time nor give themselves the trouble to examine every subject or every question. The Polish Diet or Parliament consisted of 70,000 Knights on horseback. There was no sufficient concentration of authority. The consequence, needless to say, is that Poland as a nation, long ago ceased to exist. It was the same in Ireland. There was no concentration, no centralization of authority, under representative government. There was too much 'primary law.' Ireland, therefore, is not a nation, except in aspiration, forever unrealizable." Another excerpt, June 5, 1908: "The popular initiative, so-called, is not a proceeding of representative government. On the contrary, its distinct purpose is to substitute direct government by democracy, for representative or republican government. One of its evils is that it affords no opportunity for discussion, amendment, or modification of its propositions before their final adoption." Party, in the Editor's view, was the most perfect method of carrying out the popular will. "No man, in a democracy, ever yet succeeded in any wide field of political endeavor except through the agency of party. . . . It is common with young persons to lay claim to non-partisan independence. The notion seldom, perhaps never, holds them through life. Experience in the long run, dissipates the view arid judgment prescribes a more effective course of action." (June 29, 1907.) At this time it was a political fad of many to decry party and assert "independence." The large revolt from the Republican party was made even more disastrous by the scattering influence of direct primaries. The "Oregon system," the Editor thought, might have protracted duration, but he felt certain that experience with it would convince the public of need of modification so as to preserve the representative system of lawmaking and of party organization.

"Though The Oregonian does not expect the initiative and referendum to be abandoned wholly, it does expect considerable modification of them in time, because such modification will become absolutely necessary to relieve the strain put on our system of government by this fantastical method." (July 21, 1909.)

Ought citizens, he asked, who would defend the orderly progress of society, be thus compelled to stand guard to prevent ravishment of the constitution and the laws by groups of hobbyists and utopists who have nothing to do but sharpen their knives against society and its rational peace?

"Democracy nowhere yet has ever succeeded except through representative methods. In this way only ca'n it bring its best men forward. Democracy makes the greatest of its mistakes when it sets aside the representative principle. It deprives itself of its most potent method of action. It cuts off deliberation. It makes democracy merely a turbulent mob." (October 24, 1909.) "Radical and revolutionary methods, reversing first principles of government and opposed to human experience through methods of innovation, are not methods of reform." (July 6, 1909.) 'The whole of this modern scheme of setting aside constitution and laws and of forcing legislation without debate or opportunity of amendment, turns out badly because it gives the cranks of the country an opportunity which they have not selfrestraint to forego." (Feb. 18, 1908.) "To say this is not to dispute nor to question the right of the people to self-government. But all cannot study all questions. Modern life depends o'n adjustment of the results of experience, or science, in innumerable departments, to new and growing needs. Here now is the opportunity, here is the need of representative government as never before. The people are to rule but they should delegate their power to those whom they deem the most competent to do the things wanted. O'nly thus can they get results. Representatives betray the people less than many suppose. There is danger of such betrayal, undoubtedly, for the representative may not be much wiser than his constituency nor always honest. But the people ought to be able to protect themselves by exercise of care in the selection of their representatives." (May 16, 1909.) "In all this there is bo distrust of the people. On the contrary, it is simple insistence that the people have the right to the best service that their deliberation and their suffrage can command." (Sept. 10, 1909.)

Direct primaries, said the Editor, negatived the representative method in party and election, just as the initiative and referendum did in legislation. Though hot so fundamentally dangerous they made their evil seen in destruction of rational political effort and of deliberation; in spites and revenges of factionalism; in elimination of men of character, independence, distinction, and: ability; in election of men of ambitious mediocrity, who never could obtain consideration under any system that was representative. "Under restraints of the party system, there never could have been such profligagcy in the Legislature, such excesses in the appropriation bills, such creation of additional and useless offices and increase of salaries as are witnessed now." (Feb. 20, 1909.) The new system repudiated leadership, threw leadership to the winds. "It suppresses every man who occupies a place of influence in parties especially in the majority party. The object is to get rid of all men of energy and talents; and it succeeds; to cast out and trample down every man who has superior powers of persuasion and combination/' (April 6, 1909.) "The attempt to make party nominations without some guide to representative party action always will be a blunder." (Sept. 14, 1909.)

Mr. Scott fought the onward rush of the "system" with the old-time courage that had nerved him against many another movement. But this was a struggle which he knew he would not live to see won. His life span was too short. But with the vision of a prophet he looked forward to a time when, after the strife's fury and passion had spent, the foundation principle of republican government would again prove itself triumphant.

XVII LOCAL CONTROVERSIES: RAILROAD DISPUTES

As aggressive editor and leader of public opinion, Mr. Scott found himself forced into many local political contests in the course of his long life. He entered these struggles hot at all with belligerent desires, but because he had to uphold principles and policies, many of them of national scope, against persons who were setting up local opposition. His attitude on home political issues was always conditioned by the nationwide interest, when he thought that interest involved. This method of his was often misconstrued and falsely represented. On the issue of sound money, for example, he attacked friend and foe without quarter, unceasingly and everywhere, in local and general elections, who advocated "fiat money." And it is probable that many of his enemies took up the silver idea in personal antagonism to Mr. Scott.

Early railroad projects in Oregon engendered political feuds of very bitter intensity. First of these was the fight between the East Side and the West Side companies (Willamette Valley) in 1869-70. Mr. Scott took no part in the political fight, urged both projects as needed by the public, but recognised the East Side company (Ben Holladay's^[15]) as equipped with funds to build, whereas, the West Side company (Joseph Gaston's) had little or no financial backing. In 1870 occurred the fight to determine whether the southern connections of Holladay's road should be via Rogue River or via Eastern and Southern Oregon from Eugene. On account of the large interests of Rogue River, which otherwise would have no railroad connection, the line was routed that way through influence of Senator George H. Williams. Mr. Scott supported the policy of Senator Williams. The Oregon Legislature, by joint resolution in September, 1870, demanded the Rogue River route.^[16]

A longer contest was that over the Northern Pacific land grant in Washington Territory, lasting a decade after 1877. The Northern Pacific had located its route to Puget Sound and claimed, under act of Congress, its land grant thither, to be earned by construction of its line. Financial difficulties delayed construction; meanwhile enemies of the road, supposed to be prompted by rival Union Pacific interests, were clamoring for completion of the Northern Pacific, otherwise, they demanded that its land grant be forfeited and a substitute grant be allowed for a rival route connecting the Columbia River with the Union Pacific at Salt Lake. This competing effort was headed by Senator Mitchell and W. W. Chapman.^[17] But the Northern Pacific was too strong m Congress to be dislodged. Mr. Scott contended that the Northern Pacific should be afforded every advantage to complete its road (at one time the company agreed to build the Columbia River route); that the people of Oregon should not quarrel over two railroads when they had neither, but should help the one offering them the more practicable and the earlier connections; that the Northern Pacific was that one; that, moreover, its interests were those of the North, as Oregon's were; that while Oregon needed the Union Pacific, too, it should not play the uncertainty of that route against the certainty offered by the Northern line. Subsequent events sustained this view; the Northern Pacific was opened to Portland in 1883, and the rival Union Pacific the next year.

MORTGAGE TAX

Taxation of credits was an active issue in Oregon during the decade 1883-93. During most of the period the state was struggling with a law taxing mortgages. This law (enacted 1882; repealed 1893) attempted to tax land mortgages at the same rate as the land, in their proportions of value. It had disastrous effect on credit, made high rates of interest, withheld capital from the state and imposed undue taxes on debt-free land owners. These evils were foretold by Mr. Scott before enactment of the law and he finally saw public sentiment change to hostility toward such tax. Of similar sort was the popular fallacy after the Civil War, of demanding taxation of government bonds. Mr. Scott combatted this idea frequently.

HIGH COST LIVING

It also fell to his lot, in the last five years of his life, to combat popular fallacies of "high prices." "Cost of living" greatly increased, following high tide of prosperity in 1900-05. Among the causes ascribed was large gold production. In Mr. Scott's view, the chief cause was enlargement or excess of credit; with credit reformed, after the inflation period, prices would fall. A second influence making high prices, he said, was extravagance in government, following socialistic demands for wider governmental activities. A third was shortage of food-production, due to overplus of population outside such duties, chiefly in cities. "Let those who complain about high

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A GLIMPSE OF HARVEY W. SCOTT'S LARGE LIBRARY IN HIS HOME AT PORTLAND. HE BEGAN GATHERING BOOKS IN HIS YOUTH AND CONTINUED THE HABIT THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE HE ACQUIRED BOOKS NOT FOR MERE COLLECTION BUT FOR READING AND REFERENCE IN HIS WRITING

prices of the necessaries of life get into the country and raise wheat and pigs and potatoes. Then they, too, will want high prices for everything that grows out of the soil." (June 6, 1909.) A fourth was general organization of means of distribution yielding excessive profits. A fifth was the general extravagance of living, use of costly food and clothing and luxurious habits. "They say the times are changed, and we can get all these things and must have them. Very well, then; but don't complain about the increased cost of living." (December 20, 1909.) The Editor took such occasions to recall his readers to economical ways of life, telling them simplicity would reduce the high cost of living. "Population has outrun the proportional production of food. Food comes from the land and men and women don't like to work on the farm." (December 2, 1909.)

XVIII ETHICS OF JOURNALISM

Mr. Scott wrote on the ethical and moral side of many activities; nor did he neglect that side of his profession. And in an exposition of his opinions, it may be in keeping to note his cardinal ideas on the work of an editor or newspaper publisher. He called himself editor rather than journalist, for the latter name affected refinements that were alien to his character. His conception of an editor or publisher was one who was free from all alliances, political and commercial, that might trammel his service to the public as purveyor of intelligence. With such alliances, the publisher or editor could not command the public confidence nor exercise the influence on public opinion that a newspaper must have to be a virile force in a community. Independence, he said, is required of a newspaper, by the public, probably more than any other business. In 1909, when Mr. Scott declined the Mexican ambassadorship, tendered by President Taft, he was asked his reasons by a newspaper reporter in an Eastern city. He replied:

"I did not wish to tangle my newspaper with politics. . . . I am convinced that the ownership or editorship of a newspaper is incompatible with political ambition. The people will not tolerate the idea of a man's pushing himself through his own paper, and they are right about that. The publisher who would produce a newspaper which has lasting character and influence must have an absolutely free hand. His independence must be maintained. He must stay out of associations that take from his newspaper interest. . . . The object and purpose of a newspaper is full and independent publicity and a person interested in other lines of business, in railroads, banks, manufacturing or anything of an industrial character, would better stay out of the newspaper business. If a man is engaged in the industries I have named, and also owns a newspaper, he is constantly beset by his associates to keep out of print this or that article of news or to shade news so it will not be unfavorable to the particular business in which friendly parties or associates are interested. They will ask that the matter which might be annoying or unfavorable, be suppressed or that it be presented in a way that will not carry the whole truth. . . . The long and short of it is that the newspaper publisher must not have friends who have such a hold on him that his independence is endangered."

A newspaper that sells its support or favor to a candidate for ah issue for money, Mr. Scott declared, corruptly bargains away its independence, lowers the tone of journalism, and injures the public service. A successful newspaper must be independent of political party, yet use a political party, on occasion, for carrying an important issue. As an auxiliary to schemes of capitalists a newspaper becomes disreputable and never succeeds. "Money may be at command in abundance, but invariably it is found that money can't make such a newspaper 'go' (April 22, 1905)." And on December 27, 1897: "The true newspaper, that earns its support in a legitimate way, whose business is conducted for its own sake alone, that never hires itself out to anybody for any purpose, accepts no subsidies, gratuities or bribes, but holds fast at all times to the principles and practices of honorable journalism, can alone command confidence." Once more, March 15, 1879: "A great journal is a universal news gatherer, a universal truth teller. It cannot afford to have any aims which are inconsistent with its telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, let the truth wound or help whom it may."

Guided by these ideas, it may be seen that Mr. Scott was devoted wholly to the newspaper business and to none other even in slightest measure. This policy was the source of his influence. He was able to fight silver coinage in 1896 with success because he and the newspaper of which he was editor were free; otherwise he could not have made the fight, for it diminished greatly the business of the newspaper and made heavy losses. "It is an organ of intelligence (September 20, 1883), rather than of personal opinion that it is of the greatest importance that the press should be free." Mr. Scott realized fully that "old style" journalism was passing opinion journalism, of Greeley's, Dana's, Watterson's—and that the "neutral" was taking its place; the kind that informs and entertains and lets the reader draw his own conclusions. The "fighting newspaper" was disappearing, he said. Mr. Scott made the confession although his was the "fighting" kind. "Journalism is a progressive science that must adapt itself to form and fashion and spirit, like everything else" (January 13, 1908.)

Ideals should not blind an editor or a publisher to practical needs of journalism as a business; in fact, the ideal newspaper was not practicable nor attainable. "It would be high-priced; it would have, therefore, but few readers; it would not have money enough to get the news, pay its writers and do its work. Advertisements are the basis of all modern journalism and the best newspapers are those which have greatest income from advertisements." (October 24, 1906.) Therefore money-making must be the first object—yet legitimate money-making. Such revenue must come from advertisements and they should be of the right kind. A newspaper cannot be run for sentimental or theoretical purpose, yet cannot wholly ignore requirements of the public in that direction. A judicious newspaperman continually adjusts his course between the two necessities. And in matter of news, the editor is dependent on public desires; he cannot follow his own volitions in publishing daily events. A strong newspaper must cover all news, within decent limits, that varied classes of readers demand, even including prize fight "stories." That is to say, the press is controlled by public taste and can influence public taste dnly in small degree. "It is not wholly a missionary enterprise nor a pursuit of martyrdom. The editor cannot afford to make up a paper solely for his own reading or to be read in heaven, and he is subject to the influence of the commo'n observation that the mass of readers have not the habit of thought or of mental application to read of those things that tax the powers of the mind, or that bring any real benefit." (January 14, 1881.)

Newspaper work is, therefore, a business of complications and adjustments. The editor or publisher who abides by his ideals as closely as possible, and yet conducts a strong newspaper is very rare. The success of Mr. Scott was a measure of his greatness of mind and purpose. It was his fortune to have the co-operation of two able partners, Henry W. Corbett,^[18] who during many years was a large shareholder in the business, and Henry L. Pittock, who later acquired Mr. Corbett's share and became controlling owner. Without this support Mr. Scott knew his long success as editor of The Oregonian would have been impossible; and he valued above all other energies in the upbuilding of The Oregonian those of Mr. Pittock as publisher and manager of the business, without whom, as he often said, The Oregonian would have been insignificant or would have succumbed.

XIX CONCLUSION

This brings to the conclusion of this article, but by no means to the end of the subject. For the topics that could be discussed here, of the newspaper work of Mr. Scott, would expand to any length. He gave his writing all the energies of his life and the output was extremely varied in its subject matter, large in its aggregate. Much of importance has been omitted from mention here, yet the foregoing outline follows the main currents of his editorial activity. It was Mr. Scott's lifelong desire and the wish was one of pioneer sentiment to serve the people of the Pacific Northwest always with the best thought that was his to give and to have a place, after he was gone, in the appreciation of his readers.

Notes

1. John Butchard Forbes, born in Dundee, Scotland, May 14, 1833. Came to the United States in 1834, settled in New Jersey, moved to Illinois in 1844. Started with his brother David across the plains on April 13, 1853, arriving at The Dalles Sept. 25. Soon afterwards went to Olympia. Followed lumbering, farming and steamboating. Was in Indian war of 1855-56, under Captain Calvin W. Swindall, commander of Co. F. Washington Territory Volunteers. In July, 1856, associated with Thomas W. Glasgow and Daniel J. Hubbard, he bought a Buffalo Pitts threshing machine of H. W. Corbett, Portland, for $1,150, shipped it to Monticello by steamer, then knocked it down and shipped it piecemeal in canoes to Cowlitz Landing, and threshed for Cowlitz farmers. In June-July, 1857, this machine was taken to Puget Sound. This was the first thresher and sep- arator north of the Columbia river. Capacity, under the most favorable circumstances, 500 bushels in 12 hours. Mr. Forbes was married to Lydia Croghan in August, 1856, but she died within a year or two. He died several years ago. (George H. Himes.)
2. William Hendry Ruddell, born near Quincy, Adams county, 111., Nov. 7, 1839. Went to Missouri in 1842, settling in Schuyler county. Crossed the plains to Oregon in 1851, and spent the winter near the present town of Catlin, Cowlitz county. In the summer of 1852 the Ruddell family removed to Thurston county, then in Oregon, and settled on a D. L. C. six miles east of Chambers prairie, six miles south of east of Olympia. He was married to Miss Helen Z. Himes Feb. 21, 1864. His occupation was that of a farmer and stock raiser. Moved to Elma, Chehalis county, Washington, in the spring of 1870. Died March 13, 1903. Served during the Yakima Indian war of 1855-56 in the Pioneer company commanded by Capt. Joseph White, and afterwards by Capt. U. E. Hicks. Was a member of the Elma town council for several years.
3. These subjects made up the most extensive department of Mr. Scott's large library.
4. Most Rev. W. H. Gross, Archbishop of Oregon City, 1885-98.
5. Most Rev. Alexander Christie, Archbishop of Oregon City, 1899—
6. Rev. Dr. A. J. Brown, installed pastor, First Presbyterian church, Portland, May 9, 1888; resigned March 14, 1895, to become secretary of Board of Foreign Missions, Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., New York City.
7. Rabbi J. Bloch, head of Congregation Beth-I*rael, Portland, 1884–1901.
8. Rabbi S. S. Wise, head of same congregation, 1901-6; now officiates at Free Synagogue, New York City.
9. Rev. R. D. Grant, pastor First Baptist church, Portland.
10. Dr. Thomas Lamb Eliot (1841 ) was pastor First Unitarian church in Portland until 1891 and has since been pastor emeritus. He has been active in public benevolent enterprises.
11. In this address Mr. Scott introduced Septimus J. Hanna, of Chicago.
12. Beriah Brown came to Portland from San Francisco. He spent his later life at Puget Sound.
13. Henry Watterson, editor Louisville Courier-Journal.
14. LaFayette Grover, Governor of Oregon 1870-77; U. S. Senator 1877–83; born at Bethel, Maine, Nov. 24, 1823; died at Portland May 10, 1911.
15. Ben Holladay opened the first period of railroad construction in Oregon in 1869. He was succeeded in 1876 by Henry Villard. Holladay came to Oregon in 1868; died at Portland July 8, 1887. "Holladay's Addition," in Portland, was named for him.
16. Session laws for 1870, pp. 179-80.
17. William Williams Chapman, born at Clarksburg, Va., Aug. 11, 1808; died at Portland Oct. 18, 1892. Came to Oregon 1847, to Portland 1849, in which year he became one of the proprietors of Portland townsite and one of its most energetic citizens.
18. Henry Winslow Corbett, born Westboro, Mass., Feb. 18, 1827; died Portland March 31, 1903. United States Senator 1867-73. President Lewis and Clark Exposition 1902-3.