Goldwin Smith (13 August 1823 – 7 June 1910) was a British-born academic and historian who was active in both Great Britain and North America.

He is the namesake of Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell University, and was outspoken regarding his often controversial political views.

He was public with his pro-Northern sympathies during the American Civil War, notably in a speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester in April 1863 and his Letter to a Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association the following year.

Smith gave the counsel of perfection that "pass" examinations ought to cease;[8] but he recognised that this change "must wait on the reorganization of the educational institutions immediately below the university, at which a passman ought to finish his career."

[6] Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution.

[14] In 1871 Smith moved to Toronto to live with relatives, but retained an honorary professorship at Cornell and returned to campus frequently to lecture.

"[16]: 452–453 In Toronto, Smith edited the Canadian Monthly, and subsequently founded the Week and the Bystander,[17][18] and where he spent the rest of his life living in The Grange manor.

[21] In his later years he expressed his views in a weekly journal, The Farmer's Sun, and published in 1904 My Memory of Gladstone, while occasional letters to the Spectator showed that he had lost neither his interest in English politics and social questions nor his remarkable gifts of style.

As a Liberal, he opposed Benjamin Disraeli,[22] and was a strong supporter of Irish Disestablishment, but refused to follow Gladstone in accepting Home Rule.

Causes that he powerfully attacked were Prohibition, female suffrage[24] and state socialism, as he 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 abandoned the faith in Christianity that he had expressed in his lecture of 1861, Historical Progress, in which he forecast the speedy reunion of Christendom on the "basis of free conviction," and wrote 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.

"[6] Smith is considered by historian Edward P. Kohn to be a "devout Anglo-Saxonist", a racial belief system developed by British and American intellectuals, politicians and academics in the 19th century.

[25] In his view, Smith defined the "Anglo-Saxon race" as not necessarily being limited to English people, but extended to the Welsh and Lowland Scots, though not the Irish.

These words formed the key to his views of the future of the British Empire[6] and he was a leading member of the anti-imperialist "Little Englander" movement.

"[6] Smith remained resolutely opposed to Britain granting more representative government to India, expressing fear that this would lead to a "murderous anarchy.

Arguing against British involvement in the war on pacifist grounds, Smith's views were uncommon among the English Canadian community of the period.

Smith published another anti-imperialist work in 1902, Commonwealth or Empire?, arguing against the United States assuming an imperialistic foreign policy in the aftermath of its victory in the Spanish–American War.

[32] Described by McMaster University professor Alan Mendelson as "the most vicious anti-Semite in the English-speaking world", Smith referred to Jews as "parasites" who absorb "the wealth of the community without adding to it".

[33] Research by Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick has studied Smith's writings on Jews, which claimed that they were responsible for a form of "repulsion" they provoked in others, due to his assertion of their "peculiar character and habits", including a "preoccupation with money-making", which made them "enemies of civilization".

"[42] Goldwin Smith is credited with the quote "Above all nations is humanity," an inscription that was engraved in a stone bench he offered to Cornell in May 1871.