In the summer of 1870 Smith wrote to Oxford friends Max Mueller and George Waring about the advance of Germany in Europe, the Fenian raid he had witnessed in Canada, and about life in a small American college. Letters to George Howell, secretary of the Reform League in Britain, were largely devoted to politics, as were those written to James Bryce and Gladstone. To George W. Curtis, Daniel Willard Fiske, and Edwin Lawrence Godkin he wrote about American politics and Cornell. The introduction…