Page:Oregon, her history, her great men, her literature.djvu/377

376 The qualities which match one condition are not always or often adjustable in relation to others, it was an especial merit of Mr. Scott's genius that it fitted alike into the old Oregon of small things and into the new Oregon of large things. Yet there was that in the constitution of Old Oregon which relieved it of the sense of limitation and narrowness, for be it remembered that the old Oregon—the Oregon of Mr. Scott's earlier years—stretched away to the British possessions at the north and to the Rocky Mountains at the east. Geographically it was a wide region, and some sense of the vastness of it and of the responsibilities connected with its potentialities, early seized upon and possessed die minds alike of Mr. Scott and of the more thoughtful among his contemporaries. If we regard this primitive country vrith attention only to the numbers of its people, it appears a small and even an insignificant outpost of the world; but if, with a truer sense of values, we study it under its necessities for social and political organization, there opens to the mind's eye a field vast, practically, as the scheme of civilization itself. Thus even in the old Oregon of small things, the man who sat at the fountain of community intelligence lived and worked for larger purposes and under high aspirations. In a mind of common mold, taking its tone from the life around about it, there would have developed a sense of power leading to the exhilarations of an individual conceit. Upon the mind of Mr. Scott the effect was far different. In him and upon him there grew a noble development of moral responsibility. And this he carried through the vicissitudes of changing times. It was this which gave to him, firmly rooted as he was, the power which, in conjunction with his individual gifts sustained him as a continuing force through all the years of his life."—Alfred Holman in Oregon Historical Quarterly.

"Harvey W. Scott's mentality placed him in that great group of journalistic writers from which Greely and Dana