Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/344

 undertake technical instruction in some kind of affiliation with Oxford and Cambridge, while the two old universities should still confine their efforts to the humanities. He sought to preserve Oxford from discordant features of industrial progress, and in 1865 had by speech and pen actively resisted the choice of the city as the site of the Great Western railway's factories and workshops. He had, too, encouraged the volunteering movement of 1859, and had joined the university corps, but he deprecated the increasing zeal for athletic sports, and he always regarded the college rowing races as largely misapplied energy.

Smith left England for Cornell University on 25 Oct. 1868, and although his life was prolonged for another forty-one years and he paid frequent visits to his native country, his place of permanent residence thenceforth lay across the Atlantic. He reached Ithaca in November 1868, a month after Cornell University opened and long before the university buildings were erected. He entered with energy on the duties of his chair. Residence was not compulsory, but he took lodgings at first in an hotel, and then at ’Cascadilla,' a new boarding-house for the professors. The two years and more during which he watched at close quarters and with fatherly devotion the growth of the new institution were, he always declared, save for the time spent at Magdalen, the 'happiest of his life.' He cheerfully faced the discomforts of the rough accommodation and always cherished pleasant memories of his intercourse with his nine colleagues, who included Alexander Agassiz the naturalist, George William Curtis, Bayard Taylor, and Lowell, whom he had already met at Cambridge. He sent for his library from Oxford and subsequently presented it to the university with a small endowment fund ($14,000). He wrote to his friend Auberon Herbert to send out English stonemasons and carvers to work on the new university structures. In the 'campus' he placed a stone seat inscribed with the words 'Above all nations is humanity.' To John Bright he wrote (from Ithaca, 6 Sept. 1869) of his kind reception, and that only a little more health and strength was needed to make him 'altogether prosperous and happy.'

While at Cornell, intercourse with friends in England was uninterrupted, and he exchanged free comment with them on the public affairs of the two countries. Amid his academic work, he was soon disquieted by the course of current politics in America. During 1869 a popular outbreak of bitter hostility to England sprang out of the negotiations concerning the Alabama's depredations and the old disputes over Canadian boundaries and fisheries. Smith's first publication on American soil was a pamphlet called 'Relations between England and America' (Ithaca, May 1869), in which, at the beginning of the storm; he defended England's political aims and morality from the severe strictures of the American statesman and orator, Charles Sumner. The effort proved of small avail, and ’hatred of England' grew. On 7 Dec. 1869 he wrote from Ithaca to his friend T. B. Potter, 'The feeling is still very bad, especially in New England, and everything we say and do, however friendly, turns sour, as it were, in the minds of these people.' Among the people at large he was, however, hopeful of a better tone, but 'the politicians one and all' he denounced as 'hopeless' — as 'a vile crew quite unworthy of the people.' His perturbation was the greater because the principle of protection was making rapid headway, and the doctrine of free trade which he sought to propagate in the United States was repudiated as a piece of British chicanery, devised for the ruin of American manufacturers. The political and economic situation in America continued to occasion him grave concern through the early months of 1870. Nor was it lessened by an unwelcome reminder from home of his recent political activity there. Disraeli on the platform had already sneered at him as an 'itinerant spouter of stale sedition' and as a ’wild man of the cloister going about the country maligning men and things.' In 1870 the statesman published his 'Lothair,' and there he rancorously introduced an unnamed Oxford professor 'of advanced opinions on all subjects, religious, social and political, of a restless vanity and overflowing conceit, gifted with a great command of words and talent for sarcasm, who was not satisfied with his home career but was about to settle in the New World. Like sedentary men of extreme opinions he was a social parasite.' The attack stung Smith, and he injudiciously replied in a letter to 'The Times' (9 June 1870) in which he branded Disraeli's malignity as 'the stingless insults of a coward.' Smith's retort bore witness to an extreme sensitiveness linked with his reckless aggressiveness. Thenceforth he lost almost all self-control in his references to Disraeli, and with an illogical defiance of liberal principle seized every