Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/182

 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