He regularly contributed to The Examiner an organ of advanced radical thought, of which Henry Morley was editor, and wrote for Charles Dickens in Household Words.
In 1862 Fox Bourne made some reputation by his first independently published work, A Memoir of Sir Philip Sidney, which showed painstaking research and critical insight, and remains a standard biography.
In 1870 Fox Bourne retired from the war office, and with the money granted him in lieu of a pension purchased the copyright and control of The Examiner.
Fox Bourne freely criticised the Gladstonian administration of 1880-5, and his hostility to Gladstone's home rule bill of 1886 led to his retirement from the editorship.
At first, the APS, like the Anti-Slavery Society with which it merged in 1909, supported the work of British chartered companies, and believed that nurturing legitimate and more profitable trade would eliminate slave trafficking.
[1] By 1894, the APS retracted its support, protesting against the violence in Mashonaland in 1893 that resulted from the war which the British South Africa Company had entered into with the Matabele under Lobengula.
[2] The APS, in contrast with the Anti-Slavery Society, disapproved of the policy of allowing chartered companies to govern colonies, sensing a conflict of interest between maintaining justice and extracting maximum profit.
[3] In 1900, Fox Bourne expressed in a policy statement entitled The Claims of Uncivilised Races that the native had three fundamental rights: to his land, to his rites and institutions, and to an equal share of profits arising from colonisation.
[4][3] Although he failed in his attempts to secure the franchise for natives in the Transvaal and Orange River colonies in 1906, his strong protests against the slave traffic in Angola and the cocoa-growing islands of São Tomé and Príncipe compelled the Portuguese government to admit the necessity of reform.
Fox Bourne's pertinacious patience in investigation and his clearness of exposition gave his views on native questions wide influence.