Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/220

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188
Leslie M. Scott

the training of youth; with those who can exert personal and social influence to put vice under the ban. Virtue must have its growth from within; cannot be enforced from without. Training, if not in the home, is impossible. Mr. Scott deprecated the modern habit of shifting this duty to the state. "All the duties of society (December 11, 1907), all the duties of the State as the authoritative expression of the means and measures necessary for the regulation of society are of little importance in proportion to the duties of parenthood; for everything depends on the watchfulness of parents and on their right care and direction of the children for whom they are responsible." He always resented ecclesiastical control or discipline of private conduct, resisted the pratings of "pharasaic and charlatan proprietors of civic virtue" and of revivalist reformers, drew distinctions between innocent pleasures (as on Sunday) and theocratic condemnation of such pleasures as vices; decried the efforts of Pinchbeck or Puritan moralists, rebuffed "shrieky preachers" who sought to force their sensational ideas on him or on the public. His was a middle course between the extremes of vice and the extremes of reform, a course which he deemed practicable and therefore sensible.


INDIVIDUALISM IN INDUSTRY

Most important of all parental teaching for the youth is that of work and concentration, wrote the Editor often. Industry is first among the influences of right living. Constant labor, applied to intelligent purpose, opens the way to good practices and closes the paths of evil; also it trains to self-denial and self-control. "This self-denial of which so many are impatient (April 7, 1899) is no new doctrine; it contains a universal principle that can never be suspended; the exercise of it is, always has been, always must be, a fundamental condition of success in human life."

Mr. Scott was ever driving home the lesson that there is no considerable success without great labor and they who decline the labor have no right to expect the results that come only through labor. Young people are not to shun even drudgery,