During the summer of 1880, John Swinton, the American journalist and social reformer, made a forty-day tour of France and England. The most memorable event of the tour was the interview he had with Karl Marx during his visit to England, at the seashore resort of Ramsgate. Swinton was tremendously impressed by Marx and, in an account of the interview which he published in the New York Sun of September 6, 1880, he referred to him as “one of the most remarkable men of the day”. One passage from Swinton's article, in particular, clearly illustrates the profound impact Marx had on him.