Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/98

88 was a shifting quantity, presenting each year—almost each month—new conditions and fresh problems, and calling to the man who for forty-five years was the pre-eminent leader of its thought for hew adjustments, oftentimes for compromises. If it must be said of Mr. Scott that the essential values of his character were individual, it still remains to be said that they were profoundly related to the conditions and times in which his work was done. The great figures of any era are those who, sustaining the relationships of practical understanding and sympathy, are still in vision and purpose in advance of the popular mind and of the common activities. So it was with Mr. Scott. There was never a day of the many years of his long-sustained ascendancy in the life of Oregon in which he did not stand somewhat apart and somewhat in advance of his immediate world. In this there was an element of power; but there was in it, too, an element of pathos. For closely and sympathetically identified; as Mr. Scott was at all times with the life of Oregon he was, nevertheless, one doomed by the tendencies of his character arid duties to a life measurably solitary.

The fewest number of men are pre-eminently successful in more than a single ensemble of conditions. Any radical change is likely first to disconcert and ultimately to destroy adjustments of individual powers to working situations. 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 the minds alike of Mr. Scott and of the more thoughtful among his contemporaries. If we