When C. P. Scott retired in 1929 after fifty-seven years as Editor of the Manchester Guardian he was universally acclaimed as one of the world's great journalists. It was only after 1914, however, that he had taken to writing a large share of leading articles himself, and during half of the twenty years before the War the daily production of the paper in Manchester was carried on by others while he attended to his Parliamentary duties at Westminster. It would be a mistake, therefore, to imagine that Scott's own pen was exclusively responsible for his importance or for that of the Manchester Guardian in this period. Important he certainly was, though; Ensor, who had served under him from 1902 to 1904, described him as, in 1914, ‘probably the most influential liberal in the country outside the cabinet’. Much of this chapter will be concerned with Scott as a politician in his own right and with his role, through the paper he controlled, as the propagandist of a strain of progressive politics which was at the core of the Liberal revival in the north west.