question, "What is Light?" will probably be answered when we understand more clearly a new electrical theory which was advanced by a Scotch physicist, Maxwell by name, who was a pupil of the great Faraday.

One day toward the end of my senior year I told my mentor, Rutherfurd, of a lecture-room experiment performed by Rood, his friend, and at that time professor of physics at Columbia College. This experiment was the first announcement to me that Faraday was one of the great discoverers in electrical science. The experiment was simplicity itself, and consisted of a loose coil of copper wire, held in the left hand of the lecturing professor, the terminals of the coil being connected to a galvanometer supported on the wall of the lecture-room, so that its needle could be seen by every student in the room. When Rood, like a magician manipulating a wand, moved with his right hand a small magnet toward the coil, the distant galvanometer needle, impelled by a force which up to that time was a mystery to me, swung violently in one direction, and when the magnet was moved away from the coil the galvanometer needle swung just as violently in the opposite direction. When one terminal, only, of the coil was connected to the galvanometer, and thus the electric circuit of the coil was broken, the motion of the magnet produced no effect. "This is Faraday's discovery of Electromagnetic Induction," said Rood with a deep sigh, and ended the lecture without any further comment, as if he wished to give me a chance to think it over before he added additional information. Rutherfurd knew Rood's picturesque mannerism, and my description of the experiment amused him. He suggested that the good professor was very fond of mystifying his students. I certainly was much mystified and did not wait for the next lecture to clear the mystery, but spent all day and most of the night reading about Faraday's wonderful discovery. It was made over fifty years before that time, but I never knew anything about it, although Edison's dynamos in his New York Pearl Street station had been supplying for over a year thousands of customers with electric power for incandescent lighting. Colum

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bia College was not one of these customers for a long time after my graduation. When I finished my description of the experiment, and assured Rutherfurd that it was the most thrilling physical phenomenon that I had ever seen, and that I had remained awake almost all night after seeing it, he looked pleased, and informed me that this very phenomenon was the basis of Maxwell's new Electrical Theory.

That was the experiment which helped me to decide a very weighty question. Professor Rood had informed me that in recognition of my high standing in Science as well as in Letters I could choose either of two graduate fellowships, one in Letters or one in Science, each worth five hundred dollars a year. Either would have meant an additional three years of graduate study at Columbia. I was much tempted to turn to Letters and continue my work with Merriam, the idol of all Columbia College students, including myself, who had felt the wonderful charm of his personality and of his profound and at the same time most picturesque classical scholarship. But the magic experiment which had told me the first story of Faraday's great discoveries, and had aroused my dormant enthusiasm for physics, caused me to bid good-by to Merriam and turn to science, my first love. Nevertheless, I did not accept the fellowship in science and stay three years longer at Columbia; I preferred to take up the study of Faraday and of Maxwell in the United Kingdom, where these two great physicists were born and where they had made their great discoveries. Trustee Rutherfurd and his young nephew, my chum and classmate, John Armstrong Chanler, applauded my decision, and promised to assist me in my undertaking whenever assistance should be needed. Rutherfurd assured me that I should certainly succeed as well in my scientific studies in European universities as I had succeeded in my general cultural studies at Columbia College, if the revelations of the new world of physics, certainly in store for me, could arouse in me the same enthusiasm which had been aroused by the revelations of that new spirit and that new current of thought which had given birth to the American civilization. That this enthusiasm would not be wanting was

amply demonstrated, he said, by the effect which Faraday's fundamental experiment had produced in my imagination.

Richmond Mayo Smith, my teacher in constitutional history, had assured me, toward the end of the senior year, that I was fully prepared for American citizenship, and I had applied for my naturalization papers. I received them on the day before I was graduated. Two ceremonies which are recorded in my life as two redletter days took place on two successive days; it is instructive to give here a brief comparison between them. The ceremony which made me a citizen of the United States took place in a dingy little office in one of the municipal buildings in City Hall Park. I received my diploma of Bachelor of Arts in the famous old Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street on the following day. There was nobody in the naturalization office to witness the naturalization ceremony except myself and a plain little clerk. The graduation ceremonies in the Academy of Music were presided over by the venerable President Barnard; his luxuriant snowy-white locks and long beard, and his luminous intelligence beaming from every feature of his wonderful face, gave him the appearance of Moses, as Michael Angelo represents him; and the academy was crowded with a distinguished and brilliant audience. The little clerk in the office handed me my naturalization papers in an offhand manner, thinking, apparently, of nothing but the fee due from me. President Barnard, knowing of my high standing in the graduating class and of my many struggles to get there, beamed with joy. when he handed me my diploma amidst the applause of my numerous friends in the audience. When I left the naturalization office, carrying my precious multicolored and very ornate naturalization papers, the crowd in City Hall Park was moving about as though nothing had happened; but when I stepped down from the academy stage, with my Columbia diploma in hand, my old friend Doctor Shepard handed me a basket of roses with the best wishes of his family and of Henry Ward Beecher; Mr. and Mrs. Lukanitch were there, and the old lady kissed me, shedding tears copiously and assuring me that if my mother were

there to see how well I looked in my academic silk gown she also would have shed many a tear of joy; numerous other friends were there and made much fuss over me, but all those things served only to increase the painful contrast between the gay commencement ceremonies and the prosy procedure of my naturalization on the preceding day. One ceremony made me only a Bachelor of Arts. The other made me a citizen of the United States. Which of the two should have been more solemn?

There was a picture which I had conjured up in my imagination when first I walked one day from the Cortlandt Street factory to Wall Street to see the site of old Federal Hall. The picture was that of Chancellor Livingston administering the constitutional oath of office to President Washington. To me it was a picture of the most solemn historical act which New York or any other place in the world ever had witnessed. When the little clerk in the naturalization office handed me my naturalization papers, and called upon me in a perfunctory way to promise that I would always be loyal to the Constitution of the United States, the picture of that historical scene in Federal Hall suddenly reappeared to me, and a strange mental exaltation made my voice tremble as I responded: "I will, so help me God!" The little clerk noticed my emotion, but did not understand it, because he did not know of my longcontinued efforts throughout a period of nine years to prepare myself for citizenship of the United States.

As I sat on the deck of the ship which was taking me to the universities of Europe, and watched its eagerness to get away from the busy harbor of New York, I thought of the day when, nine years before, I had arrived on the immigrant ship. Isaid to myself: "Michael Pupin, the most valuable asset which you carried into New York harbor nine years ago was your knowledge of and profound respect and admiration for the best traditions of your race. . . the most valuable asset which you are now taking with you from New York harbor is your knowledge of and profound respect and admiration for the best traditions of your adopted country."

H

E gives you at once an impression of solidity; a person not to be jostled or pushed. Of good height and substantially built, at seventy-eight he still carries himself erectly; walks with the air of a man who knows his destination and will arrive on time. The color of health is in his smoothshaven cheeks. His smile is worth waiting for and his laugh has the ring of honest mirth. You feel that here is a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows. A prosperous farmer you might say, in town to sell cattle; or if you met him in a seaport you might think: here is a fine type of the mariner, a retired captain perhaps, still capable of going down to the sea in a ship which he will most certainly carry to its destination and bring back to the home port in safety.

Such a man is Lucius B. Swift, an American citizen.

In a vote conducted recently by the Indianapolis News to determine the ten greatest citizens of the Hoosier Commonwealth my hero did not, I believe, receive a single ballot. And this is not surprising. His achievements are not of the sort that speak strongly to the popular imagination. Nothing spectacular: no loud trumpetings; no fireworks; unknown indeed, even by sight, to a large majority of the three hundred thousand inhabitants of the city where he has lived for forty-three years. Money has never figured importantly in his scheme of things; if it had, he might be rich. His ideals of what constitutes a fame worth the winning are not those of that considerable number of persons who are convinced that getting there is the main business of life. And yet, I feel that my hero has arrived, though not by the usual means of transportation or acclaimed in the common terminology of the heralds of success; yet, somehow, he has attained an altitude that makes it necessary for us to lift our eyes a bit if we would rightly see him.

I shall not commit the indiscretion of

attempting to estimate the number of American citizens who always put their country first; but I shall say without a moment's hesitation that Lucius B. Swift is entitled to sit in the front row of any gathering of such patriots. And if an investigation should be made to disclose just how many of those present really had made tangible and concrete sacrifices for their country's good and for the good of humanity, I am sure that my hero would be singled out for special praise, though he would be deeply embarrassed to find himself thus singled out for attention.

So far as my contemplation of the human species has gone, Mr. Swift is unique. I have never known a man who would risk so much for a cause as he. A foolish man, it may be said, to have spent so much time working for the public interest where there was not the slightest chance that he would be thanked for it; where, in fact, in most cases, he laid himself open to abuse or ridicule in undertaking disagreeable tasks which were, as he often heard, none of his business. Herein lies the admirable, the distinguishing thing about him: a conviction, deeply inbred in his nature, that democracy presupposes the sincere interest and devoted service of every individual, and that the public business is every citizen's concern.

I picture him as a serious, earnest, plodding boy in his early years spent on the farm in Orleans County, New York, where he was born; and we may be sure that he made the most of his opportunities at the Yates Academy, less than a mile away, where he laid the foundations of his education. Directly descended from William Swift who settled on Cape Cod in 1637, a good deal of American history had passed into his blood when he began to hear of "Uncle Tom's Cabin” and the bitter controversies of the fifties centering at last in the name of Lincoln. At the first call for troops Lucius, then sixteen, enlisted, but after drilling for many weeks was rejected because of his age. His company went away without him; whereupon he borrowed money from a neighbor to carry him to its camp in

Maryland, where by a patriotic fiction his age was put down as eighteen and he was accepted. I shall say, without the slightest fear of contradiction, that this is the first and only time in the course of his seventy-eight years that Lucius B. Swift ever lent himself to duplicity. I had known Mr. Swift ten years before I learned that he had served three years as a private soldier in the Civil War, and then the fact was mentioned casually that he might testify to the spirit of democracy that animated the men in the ranks.

I doubt whether any other private soldier in that war saw it with quite Swift's detachment. The attitude and demeanor of his comrades interested him; he weighed and considered the merits of his commanders-saw the whole business from the view-point of a serious lad capable of understanding that he was participating in a great episode of history. In a paper he prepared several years ago, Mr. Swift gave his impressions as an enlisted man of life in the army just before the battle of Chancellorsville. By this time he was a seasoned soldier with battles in the Valley of Virginia against Stonewall Jackson, sixteen weeks in Southern prisons, and two winter campaigns behind him. The end of the second day at Chancellorsville saw him again Jackson's prisoner, followed by a magical parole from Libby Prison after twelve days. He writes:

"On the evening of Sunday, April 26th, the order was issued to march next morning, each man to carry eight days' rations and sixty rounds of cartridges; three days' rations and forty rounds were the usual load. Next morning each man was left to judge for himself the amount of food which would last him eight days. I counted three meals a day, with three hard-tacks and one slice of bacon for each meal. I therefore carefully arranged in my haversack seventy-two hard-tacks, twenty-four slices of bacon, twenty-four tablespoonfuls of coffee and the same number of sugar, a quart cup, a spoon, a towel, a comb and soap. In my knapsack I had one suit of underclothing, one pair of socks, and a blanket, and my overcoat was rolled in my piece of a dog-tent and strapped on the outside. The march began, the 11th corps now under General Howard taking the lead, and then we followed and after us came the

5th corps under General Meade. This was the flanking column. We were now 40,000 strong. Our route was west up the Rappahannock. After a few miles begar the usual casting off of winter surplus, which always occurred on the first spring march and the road was strewn with overcoats, blankets and articles of every kind to lighten the load. The dogwood was in blossom and the grass was green in the fields, but there were no signs of cultivation; the country was sleeping, waiting for the war to cease. We felt well and marched easily. There was in my company a sprinkling of all kinds of spicy Irishmen and a few Germans. The rest were mostly American farmer boys like myself and included twenty school-teachers. With such a combination there was no lack of conversation and jokes, and the march was not always dull plodding. To a great extent officers and men were school and village comrades. The officers of my regiment, as a rule, were men of substance and character at home and were respected by us. Our colonel was a real father of the regiment and our other officers, although often our schoolmates and boy companions and but a single remove from actual comradeship now, were yet officers having the right to command, and no enlisted man ever for a moment trespassed upon that right. Our captain often urged the sergeants to keep a line between themselves and the other men, but we could not bring ourselves to do it with old schoolmates and when off duty we were simply comrades with them. But on duty, the matter was different; we expected to be obeyed without demur and I never knew of but one case of disobedience."

All this was discipline, preparation for other tasks that were to engage his interest. Honorably discharged in June, 1865, Sergeant Swift having, in a manner of speaking, already taken his postgraduate course in the school of war, took up what was by contrast the rather prosaic business of completing his preparation for college. He had saved something from his army pay, and on his discharge in June he went back to school, at the same time assisting in the labor of the home farm. He chose the University of Michigan as his college, it being at that time one of the few American institutions that did not re

on.

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quire Greek, which he lacked. He was graduated from Michigan in the class of 1870 and returned to Medina, near the home farm, where he spent two years in a law office. Having left the university in debt, he decided to teach until the debt was paid. The authorities of his alma mater recommended him for appointment as teacher in the public schools of LaPorte, Indiana. There in due course he became superintendent, and in 1876 he married Miss Mary Ella Lyon, a graduate of Elmira College, whom he had brought to LaPorte to join his teaching staff. Meanwhile Mr. Swift put in his leisure reading law. By 1879 the Swifts, by their joint labor, had accumulated twenty-five hundred dollars. They removed to Indianapolis, where Mr. Swift passed the examination for admission to practise in the United States courts. He knew only one person in the Hoosier capital, the state superintendent of public instruction. His receipts for the first year were thirtyfive dollars. In the second year he did much better and felt encouraged to hang Mrs. Swift taught in the high school year and then became, and continues to be, her husband's self-effacing coworker, as zealous in public service as he. In those days the bar of Indianapolis was unexcelled in the West, numbering among its distinguished members Benjamin Harrison, William H. H. Miller, John M. Butler, John T. Dye, William P. Fishback, Joseph E. McDonald, and Thomas A. Hendricks. Indianapolis society at that time was rather a tight corporation. It counted for much that one's folks could boast pioneer ancestors or at least had lived on Hoosier soil through the Civil War period and been identified with the valiant host that upheld the Union under the banner of the war governor, Oliver P. Morton. It was not easy for any newcomer without social or business connections to get a foothold. But the clients who began to find Mr. Swift in Room 2, Hubbard Block, clung to him. Many of them were Germans, who liked his industry and forthright speech and the care he brought to even the smallest commission. Note here this fact, that as his list of clients lengthened, those who brought him the most business were Germans, for we shall come back to this.

It was the way of the Swifts to make

haste slowly. They lived for eight years in three rooms, where Mrs. Swift did her own housework in addition to assisting at the office. Before I knew them I marked the couple in their goings and comings in our streets, accompanied usually by a dog that spent the day in the law office. Sometimes there was a market-basket, too, and books. Lucius B. Swift's name adorned the same door in the Hubbard Block till the building was torn down; and the story-and-a-half cottage on a side street where they still live has been their home for thirty-four years. If you pass that way you will know the place by the vines and flowers that all but hide the house.

Fierce partisanship, a characteristic of the Hoosiers from the days of Tippecanoe and Tyler too, has always made it more comfortable for an Indiana man to align himself with one or the other of the political parties. This is emphasized in the case of a lawyer, who may be assisted in developing a practice by participating in party affairs and gaining an office that will widen his acquaintance and create business contacts. Politics had been a subject much discussed in Mr. Swift's boyhood on the New York farm. Horace Greeley's Tribune was the family newspaper, and youthful interest in the slavery issue had been visualized for impressionable youth by the occasional appearance at the back door of the Swift home of a fugitive slave. Swift, the school-teacher and Civil War veteran, was disposed to take his politics seriously. He was influenced by the reading of the New York Evening Post, and The Nation, then conducted by E. L. Godkin, and Harper's Weekly under George William Curtis's editorship. Definite ideals of politics took form in his mind, strengthened by criticisms of Grant's two administrations, and the scandals of the Tweed ring in New York. Bossism, plunder, the bestowal of offices upon faithful henchmen, struck him as wholly irreconcilable with the spirit and promise of American institutions. It occurred to him that the nation he had carried a musket to preserve might still have some work for him to do.

While traditionally a Republican, he had done a good deal of thinking about politics when in 1884 Blaine was nominated for the presidency. To live in In