Goldwin Smith - Politics

Politics

He continued to take an active interest in English politics. A Liberal, he opposed Benjamin Disraeli, and was a strong supporter of Irish Disestablishment, but 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 a profoundly artificial and badly-governed nation, that was destined by its natural configuration to enter into a commercial union with the US. This would in turn 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. He was also opposed to Britain granting more representative government to India, expressing fear that this would lead to a "murderous anarchy." His opinion of British activity in the Transvaal was well voiced in the Canadian press and in his book In The Court of History: An Apology of Canadians Opposed to the Boer War (1902). This work is a fascinating articulation of pacifist opposition to the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. It is important because it is amongst the few expressions of opposition toward from the perspective of an Anglo-colonial settler.

He proposed elsewhere that Jews and Arabs were of the same race. He viewed Jews as "parasites" and "enemies of civilization," and spread his hatred of Jews in dozens of books, articles, and letters. He had a strong influence on Mackenzie King and Henri Bourassa. He also believed that Islamic oppression of non-Muslims was due to economic factors.

These anti-imperialist prolegomena were intensified and made manifest in his Commonwealth or Empire? (1902) - a warning to the United States against the assumption of imperial responsibilities. 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 William 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.”