James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce

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Photograph of James Bryce

James Bryce, right, with Andrew Carnegie; Bryce served as a trustee of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, OM, GCVO, FRS, PC (1838-1922), was a British jurist, historian and politician.

[edit] Historian

He was the son of James Bryce (LL.D. of Glasgow, who had a school in Belfast for many years), and was born at Belfast on May 10 1838. After going through the high school and university courses at Glasgow, he went to Trinity College, Oxford, and in 1862 was elected a fellow of Oriel. He went to the bar and practised in London for a few years, but he was soon called back to Oxford as regius professor of civil law (1870-1893). His reputation as a historian had been made as early as 1864 by his work on the Holy Roman Empire.

[edit] Politician

He was an ardent Liberal in politics, and in 1880 he was elected to parliament for the Tower Hamlets constituency.of London; in 1885 he was returned for South Aberdeen, where he was re-elected on succeeding occasions.

His intellectual distinction and political industry made him a valuable member of the Liberal party. In 1886 he was made Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; in 1892 he joined the cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; in 1894 he was President of the Board of Trade, and acted as chairman of the royal commission on secondary education; and in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet in 1905 he was made Chief Secretary for Ireland; but in February 1907 he was appointed British ambassador at Washington, D.C. (until 1913) and took leave of party politics, his last political act being a speech outlining what was then the government scheme for university reform in Dublin, a scheme which was promptly discarded by his successor Augustine Birrell.

[edit] Later life

As an author, Bryce was already well known in America. His work The American Commonwealth (1888) was the first in which the institutions of the United States had been thoroughly discussed from the point of view of a historian and a constitutional lawyer, and it at once became a classic. His Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901) and Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903) were republications of essays, and in 1897, after a visit to South Africa, he published a volume of Impressions of that country, which had considerable weight in Liberal circles when the Second Boer War was being discussed.

Meanwhile his academic honours from home and foreign universities multiplied, and he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1894. In earlier life he was a notable mountain-climber, ascending Mount Ararat in 1876, and publishing a volume on Transcaucasia and Ararat in 1877; in 1899-1901 he was president of the Alpine Club. In 1907 he was made a Member of the Order of Merit by King Edward VII, and in 1914 he was created Viscount Bryce, of Dechmount in the County of Lanark.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, Lord Bryce was appointed by Herbert Asquith to The Bryce Report on alleged German atrocities in Belgium. The report was published in 1915, and was damning of German behaviour; Lord Bryce's reputation in America was important in influencing American opinion toward Germany before their entry into the war.

Bryce also strongly condemned the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. He was the first to speak on the subject in the British parliament in October 1915 and later participated with Arnold J. Toynbee to produce a documentary record of the massacres, published by the British government in 1916 as the Blue Book.

[edit] Reference

Wikisource has an original article from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica about:

Bryce, James

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• Text of the Bryce report on German atrocities
• Works by James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce at Project Gutenberg