The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce
father took up duties back in Scotland at the High School in Glasgow. From his earliest days, young James was consumed by his curiosity about natural history, geography, and politics. When he turned sixteen, after his high school studies in Glasgow and, for a period, back in Belfast, Bryce matriculated at Glasgow University, where he spent three years steeped in the study of the classics, logic, and mathematics. Glasgow was “deficient” when it came to offering the atmosphere of intellectual camaraderie students would enjoy in Oxford or Cambridge; yet Bryce would later recall “not a few long arguments over the freedom of the will and other metaphysical topics to which the Scottish mind was prone.” Moreover, there were occasions aplenty for “an incessant sharpening of wits upon one another’s whetstones.” 5 When he left Glasgow in 1857, Bryce was more than ready for the illustrious academic career that awaited him at Oxford.
When Bryce went up to Oxford to stand for a scholarship at Trinity College in May 1857, he found himself confronted by the demands of the Church of England. The young Scots Presbyterian could not bring himself to sign the Thirty-nine Articles of the Established Church, as was required of all Trinity scholars. Better to forego an Oxford education and all the advantages it would bring, Bryce believed, than to turn his back on the faith of his fathers and submit to the Anglican sacrament; to have done so would have been “dishonourable.” Bryce persevered “in the cause of liberty and dissent” with an eye toward breaking up the “obnoxious statute altogether.” When he finally succeeded in winning the scholarship without agreeing to the Thirty-nine Articles, Bryce’s stance won praise as nothing less than “the triumph of liberalism in Oxford.” Even so, Bryce was never awarded his M.A. because of his refusal; he did, however, earn his B.A. and a D.C.L.6
At Oxford, Bryce distinguished himself as an extraordinary student, sweeping up first-class degrees and an assortment of scholarly honors in his academic wake. Having taken his degree from Trinity in 1862, Bryce won a fellowship in Oriel College, a position that would allow him the flexibility of pursuing an Oxford academic career or being called to the bar in London. Soon after beginning to teach in Oxford, Bryce despaired that the place was “dolorous,” lacking any semblance of “motion and progress.” In time, Oxford would prove too stultifying a place for the young scholar, once described by his friend and colleague Albert V. Dicey as “the life of our party.” 7
London beckoned. By 1864, Bryce would insist that the capital was “the best place in the world for anyone to learn his own insignificance.” 8 With its sheer drudgery, the legal training to which he had turned in Lincoln’s Inn bored Bryce.
Streaming down Oxford Street, about 11 every morning to the Inn; then books, very dreary books it must be said, most of them interminable records of minute facts through which it is not easy to trace the course of a consistent and clarifying principle till 1:30; then lunch often in some man’s company and dropping about a little, then more books till 5:30; then dinner in the hall of Lincoln’s Inn, disagreeable in this that one rises from table to walk two miles through narrow dirty streets homeward.9
It did not take long, however, for Bryce to look up from his legal studies and discover the great and vibrant intellectual universe that was London. His key to this world came with the publication of his first book, the revision of his essay for which he had been awarded the Arnold Prize at Oxford in 1862. When it appeared in 1864 as The Holy Roman Empire, it was quickly praised as having placed Bryce—then but twenty-six years old— “on a level with men who have given their lives to historical study.” 10 James Bryce, the public scholar, had begun his ascent.
In 1870 Bryce’s labors in Roman history, as well as the law, paid a substantial dividend. On April 11, William Gladstone wrote to him offering him the Regius Chair of Civil Law in the University of Oxford. Founded by King Henry VIII, the Regius Professorship had once been filled by the great civilian Alberic Gentile.11 Bryce would serve as Regius Professor of Civil Law until 1893, and from that illustrious post he contributed greatly to the revival of scholarly interest in Roman law and the civilian tradition in the British universities. The same year that Bryce assumed his professorship was the year that he and Dicey set off for the United States.
Bryce’s introduction to the nation he would come to know so well was enhanced through the efforts of Leslie Stephen, who kindly opened the very best doors for the two young Englishmen. Through Stephen, Bryce and Dicey met Charles Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and both the senior and the junior Oliver Wendell Holmes. The young English legal scholars were especially interested in conversations they had with the leading lights of the Harvard Law School, Christopher Columbus Langdell, James Barr Ames, and James Bradley Thayer.12 America was an intellectually vibrant place, and Bryce was smitten: “It was almost a case of love at first sight.” 13 Upon his return to England, Bryce committed his enthusiasm to print, publishing several articles on American society in English periodicals.14
Neither the practice of law nor the scholarly pursuits of Oxford was sufficient to satisfy Bryce’s restless and robust nature. In 1880 he stood for Parliament and was elected as a member of the Liberal Party to represent Tower Hamlets in London’s East End. It was a poor and working-class constituency and gave Bryce the opportunity to learn a great deal about the social structures of Britain.15 But for all his gifts, he was not at the start a very distinguished legislator.
A certain lack of pliability, an insistent voice, a temperament somewhat deficient in the good-humoured composure which is one of the most valuable of Parliamentary gifts, a turn of phrase incisive rather than humorous, a prevailingly serious outlook coupled with the defect . . . of excessive indulgence in historical disquisitions and analogies, these little blemishes of manner and method concealed from his fellow Members of Parliament the remarkable qualities which belonged to him.16
Years of public service would wear away those rough edges until, in the end, Bryce was deemed “one of the best and more graceful public speakers in the country.” 17 Yet in his early political career, he was often seen, as his more radical parliamentary critic Joseph Chamberlain disparagingly dubbed him, as the “professor.”
It was during these busy years as lawyer, scholar, and Member of Parliament that Bryce began to focus in a serious way on what would become his greatest legacy. He returned to the United States for his second visit in 1881, during which he crossed the continent and swept through the South. In the decade since his first visit, James Bryce had become a man of some renown in both the scholarly and the political worlds.18 In 1883 he returned for his third tour, and it was at that point that he began assiduously to collect material for The American Commonwealth, to sort through the mass of details he assembled, and to draw conclusions worth reporting. The more he learned, the more selective he became. “When I first visited America eighteen years ago,” he warned his readers in the introduction to The American Commonwealth, “I brought home a swarm of bold generalizations. Half of them were thrown overboard after a second visit in 1881. Of the half that remained, some were dropped into the Atlantic when I returned across it after a third visit in 1883–84: and although the two later journeys gave birth to some new views, these views are fewer and more discreetly cautious than their departed sisters of 1870.” That caution manifested itself in an approach that was coolly analytical. “I have striven,” Bryce insisted, “to avoid the temptations of the deductive method, and to present simply the facts of the case, arranging and connecting them as best I can, but letting them speak for themselves rather than pressing upon the reader my own conclusions.” Bryce saw himself as a chronicler, a reporter, not as a political philosopher; it would be far better if his readers created grand theories from the facts he presented than if he presented them with “theories ready made.” 19 It was precisely such “elevated thinking” and grand “speculative views of democracy” which, in Bryce’s view, had rendered Tocqueville’s Democracy in America something less than a practical treatise for men of the real world. It was for this reson that Bryce endeavored to shun the abstract in favor of the concrete.20
The differences between Democracy in America and The American Commonwealth are immediately seen. Whereas Tocqueville saw fit to spend but a single chapter on state and municipal governments, a mere 38 pages,