James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce

His intellectual influence was greatest in The American Commonwealth (1888), an in-depth study of American politics that shaped public understanding of America in Britain and in the United States. In 1895, he chaired the Royal Commission on Secondary Education. Bryce was President of the Board of Trade, British envoy and ambassador to the United States; historian H.A.L. Fisher described him as "the most successful ambassador who has ever represented Great Britain at Washington".

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce studied at University of Glasgow, Trinity College and Belfast Royal Academy. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is jurisprudence and political science and government. Places of work recorded in the authority are London. Employment is recorded with University of Oxford and Foreign Office. Positions recorded include Chief Secretary for Ireland and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Work by James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce is recorded in the collections of Tate. Distinctions recorded are Order of Merit, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Fellow of the Royal Society and Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts order.

• Honorific Prefix — The Right Honourable • Name — The Viscount Bryce • Honorific Suffix — GCVO • Ambassador From — British • Country — United States • Term Start — 1907 • Term End — 1913 • Monarch — Edward VII George V • Prime Minister — Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (brother) H. H. Asquith • Predecessor — Sir Henry Mortimer Durand • Successor — Sir Cecil Spring Rice • Office2 — Chief Secretary for Ireland • Term Start2 — 1905 12 10 • Term End2 — 1907 1 23 • Monarch2 — Edward VII • Prime Minister2 — Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman • Predecessor2 — Walter Long • Successor2 — Augustine Birrell • Office3 — President of the Board of Trade • Term Start3 — 1894 5 28 • Term End3 — 1895 6 21 • Monarch3 — Victoria • Prime Minister3 — The Earl of Rosebery • Predecessor3 — A. J. Mundella • Successor3 — Charles Thomson Ritchie • Office4 — Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster • Term Start4 — 1892 8 18 • Term End4 — 1894 5 28 • Monarch4 — Victoria • Prime Minister4 — William Ewart Gladstone • Predecessor4 — The Duke of Rutland • Successor4 — The Lord Tweedmouth • Office5 — Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs • Term Start5 — 1886 2 7 • Term End5 — 1886 7 20 • Monarch5 — Victoria • Prime Minister5 — Gladstone • Predecessor5 — Hon. Robert Bourke • Successor5 — Sir James Fergusson, Bt • Born — 10 May 1838 • Birthplace — Belfast, Ireland • Died — 22 January 1922 • Place of death — Sidmouth, Devon, England • Party — Liberal • Occupation — Politician • Title — Regius Professor of Civil Law • Occupation — Academic • Resting Place — Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh • Parents — Margaret, daughter of James Young of Whiteabbey (mother) James Bryce, LLD (father) • Relatives — (John) Annan Bryce (brother) Thomas Hastie Bryce (cousin) Marjery (Marjorie/Margaret) Bryce (niece) • Education — University of Glasgow Heidelberg University Trinity College, Oxford James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, GCVO (10 May 1838 – 22 January 1922), was a British academic, jurist, historian, diplomat, and Liberal politician. He was a widely traveled authority on law, government, and history whose expertise led to high political offices, culminating with his successful role as ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1913. He entered the House of Commons in 1880, successively representing the constituencies of Tower Hamlets and South Aberdeen for the Liberal Party until 1907. His intellectual influence was greatest in The American Commonwealth (1888), an in-depth study of American politics that shaped public understanding of America in Britain and in the United States. In 1895, he chaired the Royal Commission on Secondary Education. Bryce was President of the Board of Trade, British envoy and ambassador to the United States; historian H.A.L. Fisher described him as "the most successful ambassador who has ever represented Great Britain at Washington".

Bryce was born in Arthur Street in Belfast, County Antrim, in Ulster, the son of Margaret, daughter of James Young of Whiteabbey, and James Bryce, LLD, from near Coleraine, County Londonderry. The first eight years of his life were spent residing at his grandfather's Whiteabbey residence, often playing for hours on the tranquil picturesque shoreline. Annan Bryce was his younger brother. He was educated at Glasgow High School, where his father taught, and for a year under his uncle Reuben John Bryce at the Belfast Academy. From there he proceeded to the University of Glasgow, and Trinity College, Oxford. He was elected a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1862, without conforming to the Established Church, and may arguably be counted the first nonconformist college fellow at Oxford or Cambridge. He was called to the Bar, Lincoln's Inn, in 1867. His days studying at the University of Heidelberg under Vangerow gave him a long-life admiration of German historical and legal scholarship. He became a believer in "Teutonic freedom", an ill-defined concept that was held to bind Germany, Britain and the United States together. For him, the United States, the British Empire and Germany were "natural friends".

Bryce was admitted to the Bar and practised law in London for a few years but was soon called back to Oxford to become Regius Professor of Civil Law, a position he held from 1870 to 1893. From 1870 to 1875 he was also Professor of Jurisprudence at Owens College, Manchester. His reputation as a historian had been made as early as 1864 by his work on the Holy Roman Empire. In 1872 Bryce travelled to Iceland to see the land of the Icelandic sagas, as he was a great admirer of Njáls saga. In 1876 he ventured through Russia and climbed Mount Ararat, one of the first climbers to do so, and was wrily amused to be thought the first man since Noah to stand atop the mountain. There is no truth in the notion that he believed that he had found a relic of the Ark. In 1872 Bryce, a proponent of higher education, particularly for women, joined the Central Committee of the National Union for Improving the Education of Women of All Classes (NUIEWC).

• Illustration — James Bryce c1895 • Illustration — Bryce and Prof. Goldwin Smith, 1907 In 1880 Bryce, an ardent Liberal in politics, was elected to the House of Commons as member for the constituency of Tower Hamlets in London. In 1885 he was returned for South Aberdeen and he was re-elected there on succeeding occasions. He remained a Member of Parliament until 1907. Bryce's intellectual distinction and political industry made him a valuable member of the Liberal Party. As early as the late 1860s he served as Chairman of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education. In 1885 he was made Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs under William Ewart Gladstone but had to leave office after the Liberals were defeated in the general election later that year. In 1892 he joined Gladstone's last cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and was sworn of the Privy Council at the same time. In 1894 Bryce was appointed President of the Board of Trade in the new cabinet of Lord Rosebery, but had to leave this office, along with the whole Liberal cabinet, the following year. The Liberals remained out of office for the next ten years. In 1897, after a visit to South Africa, Bryce published a volume of Impressions of that country that had considerable influence in Liberal circles when the Second Boer War was being discussed. He devoted significant sections of the book to the recent history of South Africa, various social and economic details about the country, and his experiences while travelling with his party. In 1900 he introduced a Private Member's Bill to secure access for the public to the mountains and moorlands in Scotland. The "still radical" Bryce was made Chief Secretary for Ireland in Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet in 1905 and remained in office throughout 1906. Bryce was critical of three major social reforms proposed by this Liberal Government; old-age pensions, the Trade Disputes Act and the redistributive "People's Budget," which (according to one study) he regarded as making unwarranted concessions to socialism. Nevertheless, Bryce was regarded as a progressive figure, which one observer commenting) in reference to him being given a peerage in 1914) that Of the whole membership of the Liberal party no man has more influence with the people of England than Lord Bryce. His support of any question pending will consequently be most valuable to the government and as he is a thorough radical, it is not likely that the government can produce anything particularly in the line of social reform that will not meet with his approval.

Bryce had become well known in America for his book The American Commonwealth (1888), a thorough examination of the institutions of the United States from the point of view of a historian and constitutional lawyer. Bryce painstakingly reproduced the travels of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America (1835–1840). Tocqueville had emphasised the egalitarianism of early-19th-century America, but Bryce was dismayed to find vast inequality: "Sixty years ago, there were no great fortunes in America, few large fortunes, no poverty. Now there is some poverty... and a greater number of gigantic fortunes than in any other country of the world" and "As respects education... the profusion of...elementary schools tends to raise the mass to a higher point than in Europe... [but] there is an increasing class that has studied at the best universities. It appears that equality has diminished [in this regard] and will diminish further." The work was heavily used in academia, partly as a result of Bryce's close friendships with men such as James B. Angell, President of the University of Michigan and successively Charles W. Eliot and Abbott Lawrence Lowell at Harvard. The work also became a key text for American writers seeking to popularise a view of American history as distinctively Anglo-Saxon. The American Commonwealth contains Bryce's observation that "the enormous majority" of those American women he had spoken to opposed their own right to vote.

• Illustration — 1911 - Bryce (far left) beside Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, Governor General of Canada (also wearing top hat) In February 1907 Bryce was appointed Ambassador to the United States. He held this office until 1913, and was very efficient in strengthening Anglo-American ties and friendship. The appointment, criticised at the time as withdrawing from the regular diplomatic corps one of its most coveted posts, proved a great success. The United States had been in the habit of sending, as minister or ambassador to the Court of St James's, one of its leading citizens: a statesman, a man of letters, or a lawyer whose name and reputation were already well known in the United Kingdom. For the first time the United Kingdom responded in kind. Bryce, already favourably regarded in America as the author of The American Commonwealth, made himself thoroughly at home in the country; and, after the fashion of American ministers or ambassadors in England, he took up with eagerness and success the role of public orator on matters outside party politics, so far as his diplomatic duties permitted. He made many personal friends among American politicians, such as President Theodore Roosevelt. The German ambassador in Washington, Graf Heinrich von Bernstorff, later stated how relieved he felt that Bryce was not his competitor for American sympathies during the First World War, even though Bernstorff helped to keep the United States from declaring war until 1917. • Illustration — Robert Baden-Powell, William Howard Taft and James Bryce at the White House in 1912 Most of the questions with which he had to deal related to the relations between the United States and Canada, and in this connection he paid several visits to Canada to confer with the Governor General and his ministers. At the close of his embassy he told the Canadians that probably three-fourths of the business of the British embassy at Washington was Canadian, and of the eleven or twelve treaties he had signed nine had been treaties relating to the affairs of Canada. "By those nine treaties," he said, "we have, I hope, dealt with all the questions that are likely to arise between the United States and Canada questions relating to boundary; questions relating to the disposal and the use of boundary waters; questions relating to the fisheries in the international waters where the two countries adjoin one another; questions relating to the interests which we have in sealing in the Behring Sea, and many other matters." He could boast that he left the relations between the United States and Canada on an excellent footing.

In 1914, after his retirement as Ambassador and his return to Britain, Bryce was raised to the peerage as Viscount Bryce, of Dechmount in the County of Lanark. Thus he became a member of the House of Lords, the powers of which had been curtailed by the Parliament Act 1911.

Along with other English scholars, who had ties of close association with German learning, he was reluctant in the last days of July 1914 to contemplate the possibility of war with Germany, but the violation of Belgian neutrality and the stories of outrages committed in Belgium by German troops brought him speedily into line with national feeling. Following the outbreak of the First World War Bryce was commissioned by Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to write what became known as The Bryce Report in which he described German atrocities in Belgium. The report was published in 1915 and was damning of German behaviour against civilians. Bryce's account was confirmed by Vernon Lyman Kellogg, the Director of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, who told the New York Times that the German military had enslaved hundreds of thousands of Belgian workers, and abused and maimed many of them in the process. Bryce strongly condemned the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire mainly in 1915. Bryce was the first person to speak on the subject in the House of Lords, in July 1915. Later, with the assistance of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, he produced a documentary record of the massacres that was published as a Blue Book by the British government in 1916. In 1921 Bryce wrote that the Armenian genocide had also claimed half of the population of the Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and that similar cruelties had been perpetrated upon them.

According to Morton Keller: Bryce believed in Liberalism, the classic 19th century Liberalism of John Bright and William Gladstone, of free trade, free speech and press, personal liberty, and responsible leadership. This notably genial gregarious man had his hates, chief among them illiberal regimes: the Turkish oppressors of Bulgars and Armenians, and, later the Kaiser's Reich in World War I. Bryce was also a leader in promoting international organizations, most notably the League of Nations. Bryce had an interest in current democratic practices, as seen in his Modern Democracies (1921); a comparative study of the working of popular government in France, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Although a believer in social justice, Bryce was concerned about growing state power, as he noted in one study: Bryce did, however, write admiringly of social progress made in various nations he visited such as Australia, praising what he saw as the latter’s high level of development: Similarly, in assessing the results of democratic governance of New Zealand, Bryce wrote positively of the level of development New Zealand had reached by the time of his study: In regards to mainland Europe, using France and Switzerland as examples, Bryce noted the benefits that democracy had brought to both countries. In regards to France, Bryce argued that Bryce drew similar conclusions in regards to Switzerland, arguing that Bryce was a critic of female suffrage, which he blamed for an election defeat by the Liberals in 1918, as he argued in a letter dated the 21st of November 1919:

• Illustration — Memorial to Bryce, Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh • Illustration — Lady Bryce (née Elizabeth Ashton) - wife of James, Viscount Bryce Bryce married Elizabeth Marion, daughter of Thomas Ashton and sister of Thomas Ashton, 1st Baron Ashton of Hyde, in 1889. Lord and Lady Bryce had no children. Bryce died while on holiday on 22 January 1922, aged 83, of heart failure in his sleep at The Victoria Hotel, Sidmouth, Devon, on the last of his lifelong travels. The viscountcy died with him. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, following which his ashes were buried near to his parents at Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh. Executors of his will included his brother-in-law, Charles Lupton. Lady Bryce is recalled in the memoirs of Captain Peter Middleton, grandfather of Catherine, Princess of Wales who wrote, "Nor will I forget my terror of Lady Bryce", who was the aunt of his mother's first cousins, sisters Elinor and Elizabeth Lupton. Lady Bryce died in 1939. Her papers are held at the Bodleian Library.

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• "Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, not in shouting "our country right or wrong", but in so valuing our country and respecting its best traditions as to desire and to strive that our country shall be righteous as well as strong." • "No government demands so much from the citizen as Democracy and none gives back so much. Any free people that has responded to the call of duty and come out of a terrible ordeal unshaken in courage, undimmed in vision, with its vital force still fresh and strong, need not fear to face the future." • "Read only the best books. There are plenty of them, far more than you will ever find time to read, and when they are to be had it is a pity to waste time on any others...Goethe once said of someone he knew: "He is a dull man. If he were a book, I would not read him."" • "Time is the measure of everything in life, and every kind of work ought to be adjusted to it...Time is worth more than money because by its judicious employment more enjoyment can be secured than money can purchase." • "Excessive anger against human stupidity is itself one of the most provoking forms of stupidity."

• Charles David Richards (2024) - Unsinkable (Film)