in the spoils which his efforts so often put in their hands. His influence with them in party organization was always little or nothing. But his power with the voters, on an issue such as free silver, was to be reckoned with. Often when unable to sway politicians on matters of party policy his appeal to the public brought result. He never permitted petty questions of an hour or a day or a locality to blind him to the main issue ever confronting the country. Right up to the last of his life he continued to reassert the issue. "On trifling events men frequently scatter in considerable numbers from the parties they commonly act with; but any event or proposition of real importance will bring them back" (November 15, 1909).
The long struggle for national unity was symbolic., the Editor used to say, of all democratic progress. A democracy, in finding its way, gropes in darkness of passion and ignorance, but finally by its own force, is sure to take the best way, yet most of the time because it exhausts all possible ways of going wrong. So with the unifying process in the Nation. "It takes a long time to teach a democracy anything—that is, any important principle. Tendency of democracy is to sub-divide. It is driven together only by large industrial and national forces, which it resists as long as it can. It took a great while to bring a scattered American democracy, planted in separate colonies, together in national unity; and the process required a bloody civil war perhaps the bloodiest in all history. It took a long time and strenuous effort and a financial catastrophe, among the worst the world ever has known, to cure the American democracy of the fallacy of trying to maintain a fictitious money standard. . . . It will solve the tariff question rightly after a while—that is, after it has tried every possible experiment of going wrong."
The reader should not infer that there was hostile spirit in Mr. Scott toward democracy; it was critical and philosophical, merely. No person could have been more intensely democratic in mind or habit. The professions of aristocracy, in politics or elsewhere, were to him abomination. Only in democracy did the sentiment of justice have full sway. "The spark of justice
