There was always a strong wish among his English friends and political allies that he should abandon his Canadian domicile. But he was deaf to all entreaty, owing partly to a wish to watch the development of Canada and partly to his wife's reluctance to leave the American continent. Matthew Arnold often argued in vain that the national welfare required his presence in the House of Commons. In 1873 he was vainly invited to become a liberal candidate for Manchester. In 1878 he was sounded without result, by some liberals of Leeds, whether he would stand for the party at the next general election. In 1881 he was invited to become Master of his old college (University) at Oxford. Next year he was gratified by the bestowal on him of the honorary degree of D.C.L. by his university, but neither academic nor political baits could alter his purpose of Canadian residence.
The course of politics in England in subsequent years caused Smith many misgivings. To Gladstone's support of home rule in 1886 he offered a strenuous opposition. His attitude was that of John Bright, to whom he always acknowledged discipleship. With the Irish race he had no sympathy, and although he admired Gladstone's exalted faith in liberal institutions he credited him with an excess of party spirit and ambition and a strain of casuistry and a vanity which ruined his moral fibre. Durng the summer of 1886 he took as a liberal unionist an active part in the general election in England, and he wrote a pamphlet, 'Dismemberment no Remedy,' which had a wide circulation, and was translated into Welsh. In Toronto he soon became president of the Canadian branch of the loyal and patriotic union, which was formed to fan the agitation against home rule. To his views on the Irish union he was faithful to the end. He repeated them in 'Irish History and the Irish Question' as late as 1906. He complacently ignored the apparent discrepancy between his Irish convictions and his hopes of Canadian 'emancipation.'
The subsequent predominance in Great Britain of the unionist party between 1886 and 1906 greatly encouraged the imperial sentiment, and Smith's disquietude consequently grew. On Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who became colonial secretary in 1895 and whom he regarded as the chief promoter of the imperial spirit, he bestowed in his latest years all his gift of vituperation. The South African war he regarded as an inhuman crime, and he defended the cause of the Boers with vigour in the American as well as in the Canadian press. In a volume entitled 'In the Court of History, the South African War' (1902) he pushed to the utmost the pacificist argument against the war. He saw almost a Satanic influence in Cecil Rhodes, and he viewed with suspicion Rhodes's benefaction to Oxford. Nor in the development of American politics did he find much consolation. The success of the policy of protection, the war with Spain t and the annexation of the Philippine Islands (1900) profoundly dissatisfied him. In 'Commonwealth and Empire' (New York, 1902) he raised his voice once more against the moral perils of imperialism as exemplified in the recent history of the United States. Smith welcomed the liberal triumph in England at the polls in 1906, and he was until the close indefatigable in English political controversy. On the reconstitution of the House of Lords, the last great question which engaged public attention in England in his lifetime, he urged in letters to the 'Spectator' the need of a strong upper chamber on wholly elective principles. To a single chamber he was strongly opposed. The sociahstic trend of English political opinion found no favour with him. Although as a courtesy to J. S. Mill he signed in 1867 the first petition to the House of Commons for woman's suffrage, he came to regard the movement as a menace to the state.
But amid his political exertions, which had small effect beyond stirring ill-feeling. Smith was active in many causes which either excited no angry passion or invited general sympathy. He never forsook his historical or literary studies. In monographs on 'Cowper' ('English Men of Letters ' series, 1880) and ' A Life of Jane Austen' ('Great Writers' series, 1892) he showed his gentler intellectual affinities, if to no great literary advantage. In 'Bay Leaves,' translations from the Latin poets (1892), and in 'Specimens of Greek Tragedy,' translations from Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (2 vols. 1893), he proved the permanence of his classical predilections, although the clumsiness of his English renderings hardly fulfilled his early promise as a classical scholar. But in 'A Trip to England' (reprinted from the 'Week,' Toronto, 1888, reissued in 1895) he gave a pleasant description of the country for Transatlantic visitors, and in 'Oxford and her Colleges' (1894) he sketched attractively the history of the university for the same class of readers.
