Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/133

124 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.

Another important policy of Scott's was his advocacy of an isthmian canal, treated in frequent editorials from 1897 on. He commended President Theodore Roosevelt for seeing that the waterway became an American enterprise.

Scott was decidedly a Hamiltonian in his conception of government-an attitude that came out early in his career, in editorials taking issue with the extreme Jeffersonianism of Beriah Brown, editor of the Portland Herald. In an editorial published November 1, 1869, the Oregonian assailed Jefferson as the "architect of state sovereign y." This view persisted throughout Scott's life. Note this editorial expression of forty years later (11):

"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, but only a league of states that might be abandoned or broken at will. This was the Great Rebellion. This was the Civil War. He was the evil genius of our national and political life."

If there seems to be a bit of inconsistency between Scott the pioneer and individualist, the believer in self-reliance, and Scott the Hamiltonian, with his opposition to Jefferson's belief that the least government was the best government, we can let it pass without a qualm. Great men have never bothered about "consistency." Classic example of this is the Louisiana purchase by Jefferson, the advocate of "strict construction" of the constitution. Scott was like Jefferson in this one respect, at least, that he'd rather be right than be consistent.

In an earlier editorial (12) Scott showed himself as strongly pro-Hamilton as he had pronounced himself anti-Jefferson on many occasions. He wrote:

To Hamilton the country is chiefly 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.