James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Bryce
May 10, 1838 - January 22, 1922
Photograph of James Bryce
Date of birth:	April 18, 1813
Place of birth:	Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Date of death:	January 22, 1922
Place of death:	Sidmouth, Devon, South West England

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 (May 10, 1838 - January 22, 1922), was a British jurist, historian and politician.

[edit] Historian

He was the son of James Bryce (LL.D. of Glasgow) and was born at Belfast on May 10 1838. He was educated under his uncle Reuben John Bryce at the Belfast Academy and then continued his education in the University of 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 and remained a Member of Parliament until 1907.

His intellectual distinction and political industry made him a valuable member of the Liberal party. As soon as the late 1860s, he acted as chairman of the royal commission on secondary education. In 1885 he was made Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs but he had to leave office after the electoral defeat of Gladstone in the same year; in 1892 he joined the last cabinet of Gladstone as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, i.e. as Minister without distinct portfolio; in 1894 he was appointed President of the Board of Trade in the new cabinet of Lord Rosebery, but had to leave this office with that whole Liberal cabinet as soon as 1895. After a decade of parliamentary opposition, in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet in 1905 he was made Chief Secretary for Ireland; but even this time his cabinet post was held only for a brief period, because as soon as February 1907 Bryce was appointed British Ambassador to the United States of America . He kept this diplomatic office until 1913) and was very efficient in strengthening the Anglo-American friendship. The German ambassador in Washington, Graf Heinrich von Bernstorff, later admitted how relieved he felt that Bryce was not his competitor for American sympathies during the World War period, when Bernstorff managed to secure the neutrality of the USA at least until 1917.

[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. As member of the Liberal opposition in Parliament, Bryce figured as one of the harshest critics of British repressive policy against Boer civilians in the South African partisan War. Taking the risk of being very unpopular for a certain moment, he condemned the systematic burning of farms and the imprisonment of old people, women and children in British concentration camps.

Bryce had a lot of American friends in politics and science. One of the most prominent was US President Theodore Roosevelt.

Meanwhile his academic honors 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. From his Caucasian journey he brought back a deep distrust of Ottoman Rule in Asia Minor and a distinct sympathy for the Armenian people. In 1907 he was made a Member of the Order of Merit by King Edward VII, and after his retirement as ambassador and his return to Great Britain he was created Viscount Bryce of Dechmount in the County of Lanark in 1913. Thus he became a member of the House of Lords - that contested parliamentary body his own Liberal Party had bitterly fought the previous years, and that had been dismantled of most of its political powers in the Liberal Parliamentary Reform of 1911.

Following the outbreak of the First World War, Lord Bryce was commissioned by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to give the official Bryce Report on alleged German atrocities in Belgium. The report was published in 1915, and was damning of German behavior against civilians; Lord Bryce's huge reputation in America was important for the propagandistic aim to influence American public opinion against Germany in order to drive the neutral U.S. into the war on the Anti-German side.

Bryce also strongly condemned the Armenian Genocide that took place in the Ottoman Empire mainly in the year 1915. Bryce was the first to speak on that subject in the British parliament (House of Lords) in October 1915, and later - with the assistance of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee - he produced a documentary record of the massacres, published by the British government in 1916 as the Blue Book. Despite even this publication had propagandistic intents regarding the US, nevertheless its contents proved to be bitterly correct.

During the last years of his life, Bryce served at the International Court at The Hague, supported the establishment of the League of Nations, and published a book about Modern Democracy in 1921 with quite critical remarks about post-war mass democracy; e.g. he strongly opposed the new right to vote for women.

He died on January 22, 1922 in Sidmouth, Devon, on the last of his lifelong travels.

[edit] Further reading

H. A. L. Fisher, James Bryce: Viscount Bryce of Dechmont, O.M., 2 vols. London resp. New York (1927).

John T. Seaman Jr., A Citizen of the World: The Life of James Bryce, London/New York (2006).

[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
• Works by James Bryce at The Online Library of Liberty