Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/138

Rh leading ideas of the party and hence the futility of an attempt to make these dry bones live."

This was just four years before the Hayes-Tilden neck-and-neck race of 1876, when the "dry bones" seemed upholstered with considerable meat. The editorial is not here suggested as representative of Scott's beat.

What might be regarded as "dogmatism" on the part of Mr. Scott is defined by Alfred Holman as "a feeling of intense individual responsibility," (17). Mr. Holman cites an incident of the editor's rebuke of "a shallow and pretentious man" who, losing an argument with Mr. Scott on a financial issue, remarked finally, in desperation "Well, Mr. Scott, I have as much right to my opinion as you have to yours." Irritated, Scott replied sharply, as Holman tells it: "You have not. . . . You speak from the standpoint of mere presumption and emotion, without knowledge, without judgment. . .. I speak from the basis of painstaking and laborious study. You have no right to an opinion on this subject; you have not given yourself the labors which alone can justify opinion. You do not even understand the fundamental facts upon which an opinion should be based. You say your opinion is as good as mine. It will be time enough for this boast when you have brought to the subject a teachable mind and when you have mastered some of its elementary facts. ..."

Mr. Scott's "feeling of intense individual responsibility" was regarded as "arrogance" by some fellow editors of lesser attainments; for instance, one to whom Mr. Holman refers (18) as being told by Scott, through a friend, "that it is not for me (Scott) to judge of his merits or of his title to speak, but say to him for me that when he shall have borne the burden and carried such honors as are attached to the leadership of journalism in this country for forty years, I will be disposed to concede to him a certain equality of privilege!"

The thought occurs, in passing, that this attitude, if accurately quoted, is an expression of a contempt for the "young upstart," an impatience of anything like youthful inspiration-a source of achievement to which even the heavier philosophizing of the more mature must sometimes yield recognition.

But such a conclusion about Scott would not stand the test. His disposition to let other writers on his own paper express themselves was proverbial, sometimes leading to curious inconsistencies of utterance which failed to ruffle the editor. There was, too, the occasion described by David F. Morrison (19) when the great editor stood the acid test of tolerance. Morrison was writing editorials on the old Portland Telegram, then owned by the Oregonian publishers. He was warned by C. J. Owen, the Telegram's managing editor, that he was running counter to Mr. Scott's published opinions.

"Don't you read the editorials in the Morning Oregonian?" asked Mr. Owen.