headline. If protest were made on any account by a member of his own staff he would reply, "Oh, well, it saves the bother of answering." None the less, for he dearly loved a personal "scrap," he was more than likely to "answer" in a manner exhibiting the fact that he had not exhausted the vials of his mind in the making of a headline.
***
I have said that Mr. Scott never sought to hunt out and pander to immediate phases of popular opinion; and this perhaps was the strongest point in his character as an editor. Certainly it is a point which profoundly differentiates him from the more modern editor whose main occupation appears to be an imitation of the office of the weathercock to the wind. Looking back over his long career and upon its amazing output of individual work in some ninety volumes of half-year files of The Oregonian, it now seems that he was almost always in opposition. "It seems forever my fate to be contending with today, and to be justified by tomorrow," he would say. And it was literal truth. I cannot now think of any vital principle or of any great issue in all the years of Mr. Scott's editorial career in which he was not fundamentally right. I cannot recall an instance where he conceded a vital principle to mere expediency; nor can I recall an instance in which he permitted himself to play upon the public caprice or the public credulity.
This is said with full remembrance of the fact that a constant charge against Mr. Scott was that he lacked consistency. Upon this charge the changes were rung and re-rung throughout his whole career and by those who thought they found innumerable proofs in the columns of The Oregonian. I have already set forth one habit which formed a certain basis for this charge, but the statement does not cover the whole case. A larger explanation lies in the difference of vision between the man whose sense of obligation was to principles and to those who could never see anything higher than incidents and expedients. For example, Mr. Scott was intellectually a believer in untrammeled trade. He saw that the ideal
