demands of time and circumstance. There are two kinds of truth. But many minds are so constituted that they can see but one. Mr. Scott saw both.
The truth of the matter is that in his professional character Mr. Scott represented two types of men. He was a scholar and he was a journalist. He loved to study and to preach the fundamental and the ideal. As a man of practical affairs he knew that the fundamental and the ideal are rarely attainable, that they call for conditions and for states of society nonexistent. Scholarship and philosophy gave him a vision of an airline; but as a leader in the affairs of practical life he realized that in the working world, including human progress, the forward march is not by the airline, but by a winding road. He was an idealist but no dreamer, still less a tilter at windmills. He would, perhaps, have enjoyed a purely scholarly life—or might have done so if opportunity had come to him before the strenuous and combative elements of his nature were attuned to action—but his professional responsibilities and labors had led him far afield from the cloister. He never lost his taste for abstract studies, and his studies were more or less reflected in his daily outgivings. But he had that quality of mind which led him to comprehend the necessity for concession to conditions as he found them in the workaday world.
In the long course of Mr. Scott's editorial career he was again and again compelled to make compromises. Exigencies of time and circumstance found in him such response as becomes a leader in practical thought, but he never lost sight of any principle which had come to possess his mind and conscience. While circumstances might compel him to swerve from the ideal line,, he could never be brought to be faithless to it. Necessity might compel a change of course, but it could never obscure in him a clear vision of the guiding star.
Under the necessity Mr. Scott could temporize, but he never made the slightest concession from sinister motives. In an association which gave me the closest possible insight into the processes of his mind in relation to his professional labors, I
