In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

GOLDWIN SMITH, LIBERAL ELISABETH WALLACE B O~N i,:, 1823, in the third year of George I~'s reign, Goldwin Smlth lived to see the acceSSIOn of George V m 1910. He could remember, as a small boy of nine, the excitement created by the disputes over the First Reform Act, and as a ten year old the abolition of slavery. His memory went back to the days when the stocks and the curfew were both common, the night-watchman still called the hours through the streets, and the morning fires were lit in the bedrooms with the flint and steel of the era before matches. In after years he liked to recall the fact that he had heard Addington, prime minister of England in 1802, talk of Pitt, and that the Duke of Wellington, who lived in the next parish, had long been familiar to him as a neighbour . He lived to deplore the hazards created in Toronto by the influx of horseless carriages into the once peaceful streets. Within Goldwin Smith's memory England was transformed from an aristocratic society to a modern democracy and her working people from an uneducated mass to literate voters. He was in his forties when Disraeli declared, "We do not ... live- and I trust it will never be the fate of this country to live- under a democracy." Disraeli's disapproval might of itself have been sufficient to ensure Goldwin Smith's undying devotion to the democratic cause. The final transference of power from the monarchy and aristocracy to the cabinet, Commons, and electorate, the development of a highly organized modern party system and of a professional civil service, the growth of socialist thought and the rise of the labour movement, all took place during his lifetime . The change in public opinion may be illustrated by contrasting the Saturday Review's comment in 1856 that "To a great extent, every Liberal is now a Conservative" with Sir William Harcourt's dictum in the nineties that "We are all socialists now." The Whig supporters of the 1832 Reform Act and the Liberal upholders of the Lloyd George budget of 1909 stood on very different ground. That Goldwin Smith found himself unable to move with enthusiasm from the one position to the other, and that in some respects his liberalism became outdated, is scarcely cause for wonder. Throughout his life he looked for progressive improvement, not regeneration, hoping much from gradual reform, little from violent revolution. He died four years before the outbreak of the First World War, content to describe himself as a liberal of the old school, the last of the Philosophical Radicals, and to rest with the judgment of posterity his claim to have been all his days on the side of liberal progress. 155 Vol. XXIII, no. 2, Jan., 1954 156 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Goldwin Smith once commented that his political consciousness was rather early awakened. It did not slumber until his death at the age of eighty-six. He supported the repeal of the Corn Laws, but was too young to take any real part in the contest. One of the prime movers, in the eighteen-fifties, for reform of Oxford University (where from 1858 to 1866 he was Regius Professor of Modern History), he was perhaps more responsible than any other single individual for the eventual abolition, in 1871, of religious tests at the universities. A member of the Church of England, he yet believed strongly in the separation of church and state, considering their union a patent injustice , which made the church political, without making the state religious . The most brilliant exposition of the Little Englanders' belief in colonial emancipation was given in the letters which he wrote for the Daily News in 1862-3, and which he later published in book form as The Empire. These imperialist or anti-imperialist views, which were broadly those of the Manchester School, are too well known to need elaboration here. During the early stages of the American Civil War he was one of a small group of Englishmen-among whom were Bright, Cobden, John Stuart Mill, and Leslie Stephen- who strongly supported the cause of the North when...

pdf

Share