of his own thunderbolts to his own line of thought. Oftentimes when he was absent, or even when at home, articles would appear quite outside the range of his ways of thinking but it seemed never to occur to him that the paper could be committed in its policies by such expressions; and he invariably treated a question, no matter what had been said about it by others in the editorial columns, as if it were discussed for the first time. That this curious tendency and habit should lead to some inconsistencies and to occasional serious misunderstandings, was inevitable. They might disturb others but they rarely disturbed Mr. Scott himself. He felt himself to be The Oregonian; arid he never could feel that the paper stood committed to anything unless he himself by his own pen had written it out.[1]
The thought to seek out the tendencies of current opinion, to follow or to lead it, and so flatter and cajole the public this which has come to be almost a fundamental rule of contemporary journalism had no place in Mr. Scott's philosophy. Of what is called policy he had none at all, and he held in sovereign contempt the very word policy. "Policy! Policy!" he would say, "is the device by which small and dishonest men seek to make traffic in lies. When a newspaper gets a 'policy' it throws over its conscience and its judgment and becomes a pander. There is but one policy for a newspaper and it is comprehended in the commandment, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness.'"And by this principle Mr. Scott guided his newspaper. I never knew him to give an order to "color" the news. His rule with respect to the news pages was to present
- ↑ On February 22, 1906, Mr. Scott said in The Oregonian: "At every stage of its history the charge of 'inconsistency' has been thrown at it (The Oregonian) by minds too petty to understand even one side of the question under discussion. * * * The files of the carpers and critics never will be searched, for they contain nothing. 'Inconsistency 1 is the perpetual terror of little minds. It was the worn weapon used against Burke, and against Webster, and against Hamilton, and against Lincoln, and against Gladstone, and against Carlyle, and against Herbert Spencer; for whom, however, it had no terrors. In the arsenal of all petty and shallow and malignant accusers it has been the chief weapon. It always will be. The most 'inconsistent' books in the world are Shakespeare and the Holy Bible, most inconsistent because they say and contain more than all other books whatsoever; and you can pick them to pieces everywhere and prove their inconsistencies throughout. * * * It is not necessary to say much in this matter. The work The Oregonian has done on the mind of the country, the effects of that work, the general achievement, are known. What has been done may tell the story."—(L. M. S.)
