_Question_. Since you were last in this city, Colonel, a distinguished
man has passed away in the person of Professor Swing. The public
will be interested to have your opinion of him.
_Answer_. I think Professor Swing did a great amount of good. He
helped to civilize the church and to humanize the people. His
influence was in the right direction--toward the light. In his
youth he was acquainted with toil, poverty, and hardship; his road
was filled with thorns, and yet he lived and scattered flowers in
the paths of many people. At first his soul was in the dungeon of
a savage creed, where the windows were very small and closely
grated, and though which struggled only a few rays of light. He
longed for more light and for more liberty, and at last his fellow-
prisoners drove him forth, and from that time until his death he
did what he could to give light and liberty to the souls of men.
He was a lover of nature, poetic in his temperament, charitable
and merciful. As an orator he may have lacked presence, pose and
voice, but he did not lack force of statement or beauty of expression.
He was a man of wide learning, of great admiration of the heroic
and tender. He did what he could to raise the standard of character,
to make his fellow-men just and noble. He lost the provincialism
of his youth and became in a very noble sense a citizen of the
world. He understood that all the good is not in our race or in
our religion--that in every land there are good and noble men, self-
denying and lovely women, and that in most respects other religions
are as good as ours, and in many respects better. This gave him
breadth of intellectual horizon and enlarged his sympathy for the
failures of the world. I regard his death as a great loss, and
his life as a lesson and inspiration.
--_Inter-Ocean_, Chicago, October 13, 1894.