Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/109

Rh paper and in part by the Library Association, for he continued to act as librarian, was fifteen dollars per week. Upon these terms Mr. Scott's professional life began; all that followed was of his own creation. Even this small beginning was won by his own merit without assistance or promotion.

In the making of Mr. Scott's professional character—of the spirit in which he worked and of the methods of his work—times and conditions had much to do. It was before the day when news-gathering and reporting had become a science, before these activities had come to engross the purpose and the energy of newspaper-makers. The points of competition were not those of lavish expense in news-collecting and of lurid processes of presentment, but rather those of individual industry and close economy. The business of the editor was not that of organizing, drilling and disciplining a force of reporters, copy-readers and headline makers, but the study and presentment of facts, explanations and opinions. The machinery of social organization in a new country was in the forging; and the interest of the community was naturally and wholesomely related to serious matters. Not so much a fever to search out and present what is now called the news, as a sense of social responsibility, possessed the minds of publisher and of editor.

In its demands the situation was directly to the hand of a youth temperamentally addicted to serious things, disposed by propensity and habit to refer every incident and every question to underlying principles. I think it questionable if Mr. Scott even in his youth could have adapted himself to present-day standards and methods of journalism. Journalist, preeminent journalist, though he was, for nearly half a century, his interest was never in the things which present-day journalism holds paramount. Events, unless they were related to economic or moral fundamentals, had no fascination for him, and little hold upon his attention. At the bottom of his mind there was ever a sovereign contempt for the trivialities which make up the stock in trade of the news room. No editor was ever more solicitous for the efficiency of his journal in its news pages, but never was there one who personally cared less than