without knowing that any of the money would be employed in an attempt to incite a slave insurrection. Under the excitement following the raid on Harper's Ferry he became temporarily insane, and for several weeks was confined in an asylum in Utica. He favoured a vigorous prosecution of the Civil War, but at its close advocated a mild policy toward the late Confederate states, declaring that part of the guilt of slavery lay upon the North. He even became one of the securities for Jefferson Davis, thereby incurring the resentment of Northern radical leaders.
In religion as in politics Gerrit Smith was a radical. Believing that sectarianism was sinful, he separated from the Presbyterian Church in 1843, and was one of the founders of the Church at Peterboro, a non-sectarian institution open to all Christians of whatever shade of belief. His private benefactions were bound- less; of his gifts he kept no record, but their value is said to have exceeded $8,000,000. Though a man of great wealth his life was one of marked simplicity. He died on the 28th of December 1874, while on a visit to relatives in New York City.
See O. B. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: a Biography (New York, 1879).
SMITH, GOLDWIN (1823–1910), British historian and publicist,
was born at Reading on the 13th of August 1823. He was
educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after an
undergraduate career of exceptional brilliancy was elected to
a fellowship at University College. He threw his keen intellect
and trenchant style into the cause of university reform, the
leading champion of which was another fellow of University
College, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. On the Royal Commission
of 1850 to inquire into the reform of the university, of which
Stanley was secretary, he served as assistant-secretary; and he
was secretary to the commissioners appointed by the act of
1854. His position as an authority on educational reform was
further recognized by a seat on the Popular Education Commission
of 1858. In 1868, when the question of reform at Oxford
was again growing acute, he published a brilliant pamphlet,
entitled The Reorganization of the University of Oxford. Besides
the abolition of tests, effected by the act of 1871, many of the
reforms there suggested, such as the revival of the faculties,
the reorganization of the professoriate, the abolition of celibacy
as a condition of the tenure of fellowships, and the combination
of the colleges for lecturing purposes, were incorporated in the
act of 1877, or subsequently adopted by the university. He
gave the counsel of perfection that " pass " examinations ought
to cease; but he recognized that this change " must wait on
the reorganization of the educational institutions immediately
below the university, at which a passman ought to finish his
career." His aspiration that colonists and Americans should be
attracted to Oxford has been realized by Mr Rhodes's will.
On what is perhaps the vital problem of modern education,
the question of ancient versus modern languages, he pronounced
that the latter " are indispensable accomplishments, but they
do not form a high mental training "—an opinion entitled to
peculiar respect as coming from a president of the Modern
Language Association. The same conspicuous openness of mind
appears in his judgment, delivered after he had held the regis
professorship of Modern History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866,
that " ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of
the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical
sense." As a historian, indeed, he left no abiding work; the
multiplicity of his interests prevented him from concentrating
on any one subject. His chief historical writings—The United
Kingdom: a Political History (1899), and The United States:
an Outline of Political History (1803)—though based on thorough
familiarity with their subject, make no claim to original research,
but are remarkable examples of terse and brilliant narrative.
The outbreak of the American Civil War proved a turning-point in his life. Unlike most men of the ruling classes in England, he warmly championed the cause of the North, and his pamphlets, especially one entitled Does the Bible sanction American Slavery? (1863), played a prominent part in converting English opinion. Visiting America on a lecture tour in 1864, he received an enthusiastic welcome, and was entertained at a public banquet in New York. In 1868 he threw up his career in England and settled in the United States, where he held the professorship of English and Constitutional History at Cornell University till 1871. In that year he removed to Toronto, where he edited the Canadian Monthly, and subsequently founded the Week and the Bystander. He did not, however, cease to take an active interest in English politics. He had been a strong supporter of Irish Disestablishment, but he refused to follow Gladstone in accepting Home Rule. He expressly stated that " if he ever had a political leader, his leader was John Bright, not Mr Gladstone." Speaking in 1886, he referred to his " standing by the side of John Bright against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the West, as I now stand against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the East." These words form the key to his views of the future of the British Empire. He always maintained that Canada, separated by great barriers, running north and south, into four zones, each having unimpeded communication with the adjoining portions of the United States, was destined by its natural configuration to enter into a commercial union with them, which would result in her breaking away from the British empire, and in the union of the Anglo-Saxons of the American continent into one great nation. These views are most fully stated in his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). Though describing himself as " anti-imperialistic to the core," he was yet deeply penetrated with a sense of the greatness of the British race. Of the British empire in India he said that " it is the noblest the world has seen. . . . Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there." His fear was that England would become a nation of factory-workers, thinking more of their trade-union than of their country. These forebodings were intensified in his Commonwealth or Empire? (1902)—a warning to the United States against the assumption of imperial responsibilities. Among other causes that he powerfully attacked were liquor prohibition, female suffrage and State Socialism. All these are discussed in his Essays on Questions of the Day (revised edition, 1894). He also published sympathetic monographs on Cowper and Jane Austen, and attempted verse in Bay Leaves and Specimens of Greek Tragedy. In his Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897), he abandons the faith in Christianity expressed in his lecture of 1861 on Historical Progress (where he forecast the speedy reunion of Christendom on the " basis of free conviction ") , and writes in a spirit " not of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports despair of spiritual truth, but of free and hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is necessary to clear by removing the wreck of that upon which we can found our faith no more." In his later years he expressed his views in a weekly journal The Farmer's Sun, and published in 1904 My Memory of Gladstone, while occasional letters to the Spectator showed that he had lost neither his interest in English politics and social questions nor his remarkable gifts of style. He died at his residence, The Grange, Toronto, on the 7th of June 1910.
Goldwin Smith left in manuscript a book of reminiscences, which was edited by Mr Arnold Haultain, his private secretary.
SMITH, HENRY BOYNTON (1815-1877), American theologian, was born in Portland, Maine, on the 21st of November 1815. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1834; studied theology at Andover, where his health failed, at Bangor, and, after a year (1836-1837) as librarian and tutor in Greek at Bowdoin, in Germany at Halle, where he became personally intimate with Tholuck and Ulrici, and in Berlin, under Neander and Hengstenberg. He returned to America in 1840, was a tutor for a few months (1840-1841) at Bowdoin, and in 1842, shut out from any better place by distrust of his German training and by his frank opposition to Unitarianism, he became pastor of the Congregational Church of West Amesbury (now Merrimac), Massachusetts. In 1847-1850 he was professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Amherst; and in 1850-1854 was Washburn professor of Church history, and in 1854-1874 Roosevelt professor of systematic theology, at Union Theological
