Scott's own idea on political activity by office-holders was expressed a year later, after his return to the Oregonian editorial desk. He said:
President Hayes is plainly a traitor. He has now delivered the most terrible blow the party has yet received. An order is issued commanding the office-holder to withdraw from the management of party affairs. If this order be enforced, the people will be at once deprived of their natural leaders. No body will know what to do. Who will fix up primaries, or ganize caucuses, and control conventions?
After a half column more of this ironic regret, he suggests that there is no help for it but for the job-holders to resign from the committee and let the president's policy have full course.
Uncompromising as Scott was in argument where his principles or opinions were concerned, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of any personal bitterness.
Perhaps the story that is told (20) of his physical combat with James O'Meara gives a bit of a line on his essential mercifulness, his tendency to "temper the wind to the shorn lamb." In their earlier associations, O'Meara, whom he succeeded as editor of the Bulletin, was unfriendly, and one day O'Meara attacked him with his fists. Scott, with his towering physique, had no trouble getting the smaller O'Meara down and holding him on the floor. "Now that I have you down," he is reported to have said, "I don't know what to do with you." O'Meara is reported to have replied, "Well, if the situation were reversed, I know what I would do with you." This may illustrate a difference between the two men. There were other differences. In later years the two editors became good personal friends.
Scott's attitude toward Senator Mitchell, whom he had always fought, usually losing, is another example. When Mitchell won his final election to the senate from the legislature of 1901 Mr. Scott took the result in the best of humor and told the then Governor Geer that he was through fighting Mitchell. The senator's last days, when he was forced out of office during the land-fraud prosecutions, were free from any unfriendliness on Scott's part. This editor was no exponent of the old scurrilous "Oregon style" of editorial denunciation.
In dealing with journalism in Oregon it is difficult to avoid superlatives and excessive emphasis on Scott. Joseph Gaston, Oregon newspaper man, railroader, and historian, who from training and inclination gave a journalistic slant to his historical writing, summed up Scott's achievements in his History of Oregon (21):
The schoolmaster of the press of Oregon—the one great comprehensive mind of the two generations of men since the
