Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

would listen, he delighted in denouncing Dana as an
apostate, and in prophesying fierce retribution to the
establishment that paid him his comfortable salary when
the day of revolution should come. He was always a canny
Scotchman, with the main chance generally in full sight
notwithstanding the inflamed vision that contemplated
the pay-roll.
Sometimes the wild light did really come into his counte
nance, though he never let it get into ink for The Sun.
Swinton was a soft-spoken, softly stepping combination of
truculence and amiability. He had a bristling mustache,
a likable though rather impudent facial expression, and
eyes that protruded so much when he was excited that
he could almost see behind him, like a giraffe. He affected
a black skull cap and a white muslin tie. One morning at
a time when the cigar-makers were on strike-a branch of
industry that had his especial patronage as a leader and
adviser-he came into the office and in dead earnest
announced to Mr. Dana and myself:
"The children are starving by hundreds in the families
of the unemployed on the East Side."
"What," said Mr. Dana, "is it as bad as that, John?"
"Yes," continued Swinton, "I counted seven dead
babies myself just now in the gutters as I came through
Rivington Street and East Broadway."
This honorable gentleman and sincere friend of labor
had what may be described as a symbolic imagination.
He did not really mean to misrepresent the statistics of
infant mortality occasioned by the cigar-makers' strike.
He merely conceived the seven dead babies and became
personally responsible for their presence in the gutters
because he deemed them necessary to an understanding

of the suffering he believed to exist in the East Side.
That such was the working of his mind I became convinced soon after by a conversation at a dinner-table where
he and Henry George were of the company. Mr. George,