Smith, Goldwin

Goldwin (1823-1910) an Anglo-American scholar and author. He was born at Reading, Berkshire, and died at Toronto, Canada. He was educated at Eton and at University College, Oxford, and was graduated with honor in 1845. He was admitted to the bar but did not long practice the profession of law. From 1858 to 1866 he was regius professor of modern history at Oxford. During that time he attracted attention first by appreciative lectures on Cromwell which aroused controversy, and later by a vigorous advocacy of the cause of the North in the American Civil War. In 1868 he came to the United States to accept the position of professor of English and constitutional history at Cornell University. In 1871 he went to Canada where he lived until his death in 1910. There he pursued a life of literary activity, editing successively the Canadian Monthly, The Bystander, and The Week, and constantly contributing volumes, brochures, and pamphlets to the press on subjects, generally controversial, ranging from religion to biography. He was a brilliant, a forceful, and an incisive writer. Among his better known biographies are Three English Statesmen (Pym, Cromwell, and Pitt), and The Moral Crusader, William Lloyd Garrison. In his will he bequeathed $1,000,000 to Cornell University.

Mr. Smith's views of the relations between the United States and Canada are of interest. He was often called an annexationist by his opponents, but himself repudiated the word as "something humiliating to Canada." Yet his belief remained firm that "continental union in a free and honorable way will come. It will probably not come in the time of anyone as old as I am; but it will come." "No schemes of Imperial Federationists will defeat nature, whose forces draw toward union. Race, language, literature, religion, political institutions, social sentiments, and habits are the same on both sides of the line. . . . It may safely be said that the connection of each of the Canadian provinces with the states to the south of it is stronger than that of the Maritime provinces with Ontario, or of French Quebec, with either. The populations, in short, are rapidly fusing. There will soon be nothing to divide them but a political and fiscal line."

Thus it was that Cornell gained the most distinguished member of its faculty; and thus it was that Goldwin Smith, taking up his residence in Ithaca in 1868, when the new institution opened its doors for students, found himself an active worker in a university which had practically none of the attributes suggested by the Old World connotation of that term. The university was "land poor," and its equipment was meagre in the extreme. Smith refused to accept any salary for his services, and sent to England for his private library in order that his students might have the tools indispensable for historical work. He also brought stone-carvers from England to ornament the new buildings as they arose, and ivy from Oxford for their walls. He had a stone seat placed in the campus, and above it inscribed the motto, "Above all nations is humanity." No wonder that Cornell has ever since held him in grateful remembrance as its patron saint. His reward was found in the welcome accorded him, and in the improvement in health that resulted from this pioneer university life, with its open-air allurements.

As a Canadian, he plunged into the thick of the public life of the Dominion, and made himself an active force for good in politics. His journalistic activities were multifarious and unceasing, he was a frequent speaker from the platform, and he was a worker upon innumerable boards and commissions affected with a public interest. A stout fighter wherever fundamental principles were concerned, he made enemies as well as friends, and became persona non grata to the aristocratic and imperialistic elements in Canadian society through his unswerving championship of democracy and his persistent advocacy of the opinion that the best interests of Canada were to be furthered by the closest possible union with the republic south of the border. But if his name came to be anathema in tory circles, his arguments remained unanswered and unanswerable. Economic forces always have the last word in political discussion.

Goldwin Smith lived and died in the best sense a friend of our own country. He was not blind to the evils with which we have to contend, and thus enumerated some of the worst of them: "The negro difficulty, the spread of lawlessness, the weakness of American statesmanship and government, the municipal corruption, the pension list, but, above all, the renunciation of the fundamental principles of the American commonwealth, consequent on the annexation of the Philippines, and the entanglement of the American Department of State with the un-American councils and designs of European powers."-The Dial.