Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/342

 offended a large section of the public. The colonial press, especially in Australia, hotly repudiated them (cf., Thirty Years of Colonial Government, 1889, i. 209 ; letter from Bowen to Gladstone, 18 Aug. 1862). Disraeli in the House of Commons ridiculed 'the wild opinions' of all professors, rhetoricians, prigs and pedants (Hansard, 5 Feb. 1863), and thenceforth he habitually imputed a mischievous tendency to Smith's pohtical propaganda.

In 1862 Smith visited at Dublin his friend Cardwell, who was chief secretary for Ireland, and in the same year issued 'Irish History and Irish Character.' He divided the blame for the miseries of Ireland between English misgovemment, which disestablishment of the Irish church and revision of the land laws might correct, and defects of Irish character, which were irremediable.

But Smith's interests were soon absorbed by the civil war in America. His antipathy to war at first led him to doubt the adequacy of the federal cause, and to favour the claim of the South to the right of secession. But the eloquence of John Bright, which always powerfully influenced him, convinced him that the main principle at stake in the conflict was the liberation of the slave, and before long he engaged with fiery zeal in the agitation in England on behalf of the federal government. He first appeared on a political platform at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 6 April 1863, at a meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society, which Thomas Bayley Potter [q. v.] had formed in the federal interest and was supporting at his own cost. Smith protested with sombre earnestness 'against the building and equipping of piratical ships in support of the Southern slaveholders' confederacy' (, Hist. of the Civil War, iii. 470). Soon afterwards, at the Manchester Athenæum, he lectured on 'Does the Bible sanction American Slavery ?' and answered the question in the negative. In the same year he published a pamphlet attesting 'the morality of the emancipation proclamation.'

Next year he resolved to visit America to carry to the North a message of sympathy from England. He landed on 6 Sept. 1864 at New York and saw much of the country during some three months' stay. At Washington, where he was the guest of Seward, the secretary of state, he was received with characteristic absence of ceremony by President Lincoln, whose precise and minute information impressed him (, Reminiscences of Lincoln, 1886). He visited the federal camp before Richmond on the Potomac and conversed with General Butler. At Cambridge, Massachusetts, he met C. E. Norton and Lowell, and at Boston, where he witnessed the presidential election (9 Nov.), he saw Emerson and the historian Bancroft. At Providence, Brown University conferred on him the degree of LL.D, Chicago and Baltimore also came within the limits of his tour (Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc. Oct. 1910, account of Smith's visit, pp. 3-13). In letters to the London 'Daily News' he described some of his experiences, and commended the steady purpose of the North and its grim determination to make the South submit. The confederate press abused him roundly, but he was enthusiastically received by the federals, and before he left America the Union League Club entertained Mm at New York (12 Nov. 1864), when he expressed abounding sympathy with the American people.

Until the final triumph of the North, Smith continued its defence among his countrymen. A pamphlet 'England and America' (1865) effectively sought to bring the sentiments of the two countries into accord. At the meeting which saw the disbandment of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society in Jan. 1866 he spoke with optimistic eloquence of America's future. 'Slavery,' he said, 'is dead everywhere and for ever.' 'By war no such delivery was ever wrought for humanity as this.'

Next year he engaged with wonted heat in another agitation. In 1867 he joined the Jamaica committee which was formed to bring to punishment Governor Eyre for alleged cruelties in suppressing a rebellion of negroes. J. S. Mill was the moving spirit of the committee, and with him Smith grew intimate. An opposing committee in Eyre's favour, of which Carlyle, Kingsley, Tennyson, and Ruskin were members, drew from Smith much wrathful denunciation ; Ruskin's championship of what Smith viewed as cruelty excited his especial scorn, and a rancorous controversy followed later between the two men. In the interests of the funds of the Jamaica committee. Smith went about the country delivering a series of four 'Lectures on three Enghsh Statesmen' — one each on Pym and Cromwell and two on Pitt. These he published in 1867 with a dedication to Potter. His powers of historical exposition are here seen to advantage, but an irrepressible partisan fervour keeps the