intellectual and ethical as well as political and social problems. To all
these peoples he tried to explain what the others believed, how they
had dealt with similar situations, and why they thought and behaved
as they did.

A journalist by profession, he had a scholar's interest in comparative
government and a student's curiosity about the way in which trans-
planted British ideas and institutions were modified by the history and
environment of new lands. The only contemporaries who attempted a
similar comparative analysis were his friends Sir Charles Dilke and
James Bryce. An observer rather than a participant in public affairs,
Goldwin Smith was at least their peer in felicity of style. In an age of
great writers the effectiveness of his prose was unsurpassed. Through
the pages of some two hundred English, American, and Canadian
journals he sought to mould contemporary thought by timely editorials
and articles, rather than by longer studies on less evanescent themes.
His hobby was writing letters to editors, to which he attached almost
as much importance as to essays and editorials. At the same time he
kept up a voluminous correspondence with friends in Great Britain and
the United States. His papers in the Cornell University Library contain
letters from leading statesmen, journalists, and literary men, with some
of whom he corresponded for almost half a century. Many of these
played a more responsible and important part in public affairs than he
did, and their reflections on the contemporary scene are full of interest.
Their letters and his present a revealing picture of Victorian liberalism.

Ostrogorski suggests that during the third quarter of the nineteenth
century Goldwin Smith's influence on the rising generation in England
almost equalled that of John Stuart Mill. ¹ In Canada his impact on the
course of events was less, because he failed to understand the nascent
nationalism which ran counter to his vision of continental unity. But
the encouragement he gave Canadian letters and the standard he set
Canadian journalism can scarcely be overestimated.

A volume of Reminiscences, prepared during the last years of his
life, was edited and published after his death in 1910 by his secretary,
Arnold Haultain. Goldwin Smith did not intend this as an auto-
biography, since he considered his life too unimportant to record. The
book is what the title suggests: an old man's recollections of people and
places. Full of anecdotes about men and events, it contains much
repetition, and for most part deals with his early life in England. The
later years in Canada fill only three brief chapters. In 1913 Mr. Haultain
published two further volumes: Goldwin Smith, His Life and Opinions

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