Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect, by HS Jones, Princeton University Press,  445 pp,  £38, ISBN:  978-0691277219
 
Those who casually throw around the phrase ‘an international reputation’ when writing references or obituaries would do well to dwell on the case of James Bryce.  When he died in January 1922 his widow received almost a thousand letters of condolence, led by King George V, the US president Warren Harding and several former presidents.  His memorial service in Westminster Abbey was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury; a week later the Armenian community in Constantinople, led by the patriarch, celebrated a requiem for him.  Several reports quoted Woodrow Wilson’s earlier praise for him as ‘the greatest living Englishman’; the Scotsman tried to set the record straight by claiming him as ‘A Scot of Dauntless Integrity’; the Northern Whig, a Belfast newspaper, countered by calling him ‘A Great Belfastman’.  His death was lamented in, among other countries, ‘India, Canada, South Africa, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, and Serbia’.  That is ‘an international reputation’.
 
It was hardly to be expected that Bryce’s quite extraordinary standing at the time of his death would endure undiminished, but his stock has plummeted further and faster than that of several of his peers who might have seemed to have no better claim to posthumous fame.  HS (Stuart) Jones speculates that the very diversity of Bryce’s achievements came to count against him.  His career might almost have seemed to have been designed as a rebuke to the forces of specialisation that were increasingly marking public and intellectual life in his time.  He was a scholar: he published three big books, in particular, that attracted widespread attention – The Holy Roman Empire (1864), The American Commonwealth, 3 vols (1888), and Modern Democracies, 2 vols (1921).  He held academic posts as a Fellow of Oriel College from 1862 and as Professor of Civil Law at Oxford from 1870 to 1893.  He was a politician, a Liberal MP from 1880 to 1907 with several spells as a government minister, latterly (1905-1907) as Chief Secretary for Ireland (‘the first professor to hold a Cabinet office’ it seems).  He was a notable British ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1913, credited with doing more than most of his predecessors or successors to bring sentiments in the two countries into closer harmony.  He was the kind of public figure who was called upon to front any number of organisations and committees, including serving as chairman of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education in 1894-5, president of the British Academy from 1913-1917, chairman of the Inquiry into alleged German atrocities in Belgium 1914-15, and figurehead of ‘the Bryce Group’ which drew up plans for a ‘league of nations’ in the latter stages of the First World War.  A modest amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to his work in each of these roles, but these fragments have not coalesced into an account of him that seems at all commensurate with his remarkable reputation during his lifetime.  Among his friends and contemporaries, Henry Sidgwick remains at the centre of debates about the philosophical defence of Utilitarianism while A.V. Dicey continues to be a reference-point in discussions of the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty: there is no one comparable achievement or doctrine which has Bryce’s name indissolubly attached to it, though The American Commonwealth gets respectful mentions as a once-influential analysis of the working of that system of government.  Stuart Jones’s Liberal Worlds is an impressive attempt to remedy this situation.  It gives an integrated account of Bryce’s manifold activities; it is based on deep scholarship, drawing on fifty-eight different archival collections as well as displaying a remarkable command of the secondary literature across all the relevant fields; and it is admirably judicious and perceptive, teasing out the inner logic of Bryce’s thinking and actions without exaggerating their consistency.  Although it takes the form of a detailed biography, not always the most highly regarded scholarly genre, this is a substantial work of intellectual history.
 
Those conflicting claims about Bryce’s national identity that greeted news of his death reflected his complex inheritance.  Bryce was born in Belfast in 1838, spending the first eight years of his life in that city.  His parents had been born and raised in Ulster, but, like so many of their neighbours in the nineteenth century, thought of themselves as Scots, Bryce’s paternal grandfather having crossed the Irish Sea from Lanark in 1805.  The family moved to Glasgow in 1846, with Bryce attending Glasgow High School and subsequently, from 1854, the University of Glasgow.  But then he, like many a bright Glasgow boy before and since, got a scholarship to Oxford, taking a First in ‘Greats’ in the summer of 1861, followed, remarkably, by a First in Law and History the following term.  Thereafter, his life was largely spent in those quintessentially English institutions, Oxford University, the Inns of Court, and parliament (though, after representing an East London constituency for five years, he did sit as the MP for Aberdeen South for the remainder of his time in the Commons).  Common usage at the time, both at home and abroad, spoke of ‘England’ where we might more accurately speak of ‘Britain’, and Bryce was generally regarded (and may even have regarded himself) as an Englishman of Scottish descent.  In terms of the cod-racial terms favoured at the time, it mattered that the Scots-Irish, whether from Ulster or lowland Scotland, were, unlike the ‘Irish’ and Highland Scots, of ‘Teutonic’ not ‘Celtic’ stock.

What mattered far more to Bryce and, especially, to his family was that they were Presbyterians, and more particularly, in the notoriously fissiparous world of Scottish Presbyterianism, members of the United Presbyterian Church (‘united’ only in the sense of bringing together two earlier secessionist groups).  Theirs was a stern, unbending creed, hostile to the slightest taint of ecclesiastical hierarchy or Erastian patronage.  There had to be a good deal of strained negotiation between Bryce and his family when the question arose of his applying for a Fellowship at an Oxford college lest, according to the regulations then prevailing, he would thereby be forced to subscribe to the articles of the Church of England, a body abhorred by most Scottish Presbyterians as Erastianism incarnate (a way was eventually found for Bryce to proceed, not without a lot of dark muttering by his uncle, the Reverend John Bryce, a fierce monitor of all forms of backsliding).  In later life, Bryce himself seems to have taken a much more relaxed view of church affiliation, but his devotion to the Bible and to the conviction that morality was the essence of religion remained strong.
 
Bryce enjoyed a sequence of triumphs in his early Oxford years, culminating in the publication, when he was only twenty-six, of The Holy Roman Empire, a revised and extended version of the work that had won the Arnold Historical Essay Prize the previous year.  Jones makes a good case for seeing this more as a study in the history of political thought rather than a straight political or institutional history, an exploration of what the concept of ‘empire’ had meant across a thousand-year span.  But it was also the first manifestation of Bryce’s abiding interest in the tensions between the strong attachments engendered by small local communities and the political value of the role of wider coordinating institutions, a theme that was to recur in his study of the American political system, as well as, in more muted terms, in Modern Democracies.  The book was a huge success, frequently reprinted and translated, but, as Jones notes: ‘Astonishing as it may seem after The Holy Roman Empire, Bryce never again wrote a book on history.’  Financial imperatives as well as his own inclinations drove him away from Oxford and out into the world of public activities, even though he was to return to the essentially part-time post of Professor of Civil Law for a number of years.  But by then he had become a ‘public intellectual’ avant la lettre.
 
In so far as there is a scholarly literature on Bryce, there are three issues on which his later career has come in for some quite rough handling – his change of mind that led him to support Home Rule for Ireland, his opposition to votes for women, and his apparent endorsement of some form of racial segregation.  Jones examines the evidence with scrupulous care, making the best case for the rationale behind Bryce’s positions without, at least in the second and perhaps the third of these instances, quite persuading us that there is no charge to answer.
 
Sustained by both family tradition and a belief in the superiority of large states, Bryce was a firm unionist in the early years of his political career.  But when Gladstone upended British party politics by announcing his commitment to Home Rule in 1886, he publicly supported the policy, attracting charges of being a turncoat who was angling for preferment in the Grand Old Man’s third ministry.  Through careful attention to chronology and to unpublished family correspondence, Jones is able to establish that Bryce’s conversion to Home Rule was already under way well before Gladstone’s announcement.  Whether this change entailed any incoherence in his political thinking is a more complex matter.  The best case that can be made for consistency is to say that although he favoured large states over obstructive or wasteful smaller entities, he was at the same time deeply sympathetic to the feelings of small nations oppressed by a larger power.  Around 1880 he still believed that enlightened government from London was in the best interests of both England and Ireland, but the clear rise in nationalist sentiment within Ireland in the next few years (at least in three of the four provinces) convinced him that attempting to maintain English rule by force would be an unsustainable option.  Most of his intellectual peers, Dicey and Sidgwick among them, did not share this view and so they went on to support the Liberal Unionist breakaway party, while Bryce remained faithful to Gladstone’s leadership (thus incurring the charges of careerist opportunism).  By surveying his entire career, Jones is able to argue that Bryce’s position was not the volte-face that it seemed at the time: ‘He championed the Icelander against the Dane, and the Armenian, the Greek and the Bulgarian against the Turk; the Boer against the British, and the Tyrolese against the Italian.  Viewed in this perspective, it made perfect sense to sympathize with the cause of Home Rule.’
 
The second charge, concerning his opposition to votes for women, is harder to rebut.  Bryce consistently championed women’s education, providing support for, among others, Girton College in Cambridge, Bedford and Royal Holloway Colleges in London, the Women’s Education Union, and the Girls’ Public Day School Company (later Trust).  By the standards of the day, his attitudes to women were enlightened, and he regarded his sisters and his wife, Marion, as among his principal advisers and collaborators.  But, throughout his career he consistently opposed female suffrage, even after 1918 when a limited form of it had been granted. Why?  The beginnings of an answer can be found in his convictions about two related topics: on the one hand, his rationale for recent and proposed extensions of the suffrage; and on the other, the power of public opinion in modern states.  Bryce did not think of the vote as a ‘right’: it was a device for arriving at a sound form of government, and so any proposed extension of the suffrage had to be judged in terms of its contribution to that goal.  Experience of practical affairs made citizens more likely to be able to contribute constructively to the goal of good government.  The formation of an enlightened public opinion was key: for Bryce, the great danger of modern politics was demagoguery, the leading of gullible voters astray by means of personal charisma and wild promises (many of Bryce’s contemporaries considered that this charge could be levelled at Gladstone; Bryce disagreed, and singled out Joseph Chamberlain for condemnation on this score).  Bryce believed that because women, by the very nature of their family roles and social situation, had little experience of practical affairs, they would be likely to swell the ranks of those injudicious forms of public opinion which demagoguery could exploit. 
 
Jones valiantly tries to put the best face on Bryce’s position: in a sense, he argues, ‘we see Bryce deploying a republican case against universal suffrage especially if conceived as a matter of rights’.  There is a partial truth in that, but it fails to address the two most obvious weaknesses in Bryce’s position.  First, it was patronising to women in general and especially to those many women who, by the Edwardian period, had shown conspicuous capacity in various areas of public life.  Second, the logic of his position might seem to entail removing the vote from some members of that part of the male population enfranchised in 1884.  Obviously, this was not a realistic option, but that only underlined the growing power of the arguments that were to accompany subsequent moves to extend the franchise, namely that the vote conferred the dignity of full citizenship on adult members of the population and gave them a voice in defending their interests.  It is right to be reminded that opposition to female suffrage before 1918 was not merely a matter of male prejudice, and also that a significant number of prominent women supported the anti-suffrage cause. Nonetheless, the ground on which Bryce attempted to stand was shifting beneath his feet: his Whig-Republican conception of citizenship as a trust based on proven capacity rather than a right claimed by all adults may have resonated with educated opinion in the years of his early career between the second and third Reform Acts, but it had less and less purchase in the mass politics of the early twentieth century.
 
In the case of both Home Rule and votes for women, Bryce’s positions were strongly criticised by prominent voices at the time.  That was much less the case with the third contentious issue, his position on the relations between races.  Here it seems that the charge of racism owes more to early twenty-first century susceptibilities than to late nineteenth century opinion.  In his Romanes lecture for 1902, Bryce took as his topic ‘The relations of the advanced and backward races of mankind’.  Like most of his contemporaries, he regarded those categories as unproblematically descriptive, with the ‘coloured’ races as the chief instances of the second category.  He explored various avenues towards greater integration, especially intermarriage, but in the case of the ‘Negro race’, as it was termed, he thought such blending would be resisted by the ‘white race’, and so some form of separate co-existence might be the best practical outcome.  Some modern historians have seen this as an unabashed endorsement of apartheid, giving legitimacy to the treatment at the time of black people as second-class inhabitants in places such as South Africa or the American Deep South.
 
Jones persuasively argues that this charge cannot be sustained when one looks carefully at the full range of Bryce’s writings.  His Romanes lecture is something of an outlier in his oeuvre, reflecting contemporary anxieties about racial decline.  Even on that occasion, Bryce was writing in a quizzical and anxious register rather than confidently prescribing a policy.  More generally, he favoured integrationist policies wherever practicable, and he also came to feel, especially after his travels in South America in 1910, that the beneficent effects of inter-marriage could be more confidently anticipated than he had allowed in 1902.  It’s true that he believed that the sudden enfranchisement of Blacks in the American South after the Civil War had been a mistake, for much the same reason as he opposed the enfranchisement of women, namely that this sudden increase in the electorate as a result of adding a population with no previous experience of practical affairs laid the ground for misgovernment and corruption, as evidenced by the role of Northern ‘carpet-baggers’.  Once again, a certain condescension lurks in his position, but he was no ‘white supremacist’, and he looked forward to a time when the ‘races’ would be able to mingle on terms of greater equality.
 
In considering Bryce’s two major works on political systems, The American Commonwealth and Modern Democracies, Jones is keen to persuade us that they are not simply compendious compilations of data, as they have sometimes been described, but enquiries into what would now be called ‘political culture’.  It is true that Bryce consistently argued against facile attempts to claim that a constitutional arrangement or other piece of political machinery that worked well in one setting could be transferred with no less success to any other.  Here, again, his expanded notion of ‘public opinion’ came into play: the ‘character’ of a particular people was what enabled the machinery to work in their case, many historical and geographical factors having contributed to the formation of the requisite attitudes and capacities.  Like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by the improbable success of Switzerland as a political entity that did not depend on racial or linguistic homogeneity, but – at least so its champions claimed – on the identification that arose from generations of citizenly participation (the participation of male citizens, we might now feel compelled to point out).  Bryce, Jones insists, was no mere taxonomist of constitutional ‘facts’, and I am among those historians ticked off – gently, but quite rightly in my case – for some over-brisk comments on the matter made forty years ago.
 
When all these admirably careful clarifications and qualifications of Bryce’s various views have been entered, there remains something vaguely dispiriting about reading Bryce in bulk.  Jones does not essay anything at all close to literary criticism, so the reader has to discover the properties of Bryce’s voice at first hand, but he does make one telling observation in passing: 

‘The reader who comes to The Holy Roman Empire with a prior knowledge of some of Bryce’s later work will be struck by the difference in style.  The later Bryce had a preference for a simple, unadorned style, befitting one who sought to come before his readers as one presenting them with ‘the facts’.  The Holy Roman Empire, by contrast, has more than an echo of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.’

This is surely right, but if one pursues this thought a little further it may cast some light on the question of the decline of Bryce’s posthumous reputation.  The Holy Roman Empire is very much a young man’s book, rather too quick and showy in places, but full of life and a desire to win over its readers, not merely to inform them.  If Bryce’s later writings are hard going (and they are), it is partly because they are too ‘unadorned’, too little concerned with the reader’s possible responses.  The information they contain – vast, accurate, and impressively wide-ranging as that information may be – is assumed to have self-evident claim on the reader: it would be pleasing to think that there was an element of self-irony in the Gradgrindian exclamation in Modern Democracies: ‘It is Facts that are needed: Facts, Facts, Facts’, but that disheartening credo does capture some of the character of that book and, to a lesser extent, of The American Commonwealth.  The result is that such compilations are soon replaced by newer works with more up-to-date facts.  Consider, by contrast, the fate of work by two of Bryce’s putative peers.  Bagehot’s The English Constitution may soon have become dated in some respects, but its provoking, epigrammatic style continued to captivate readers; Maine’s Popular Government may have got things wrong, as Bryce pointed out, but the force and trenchancy of its critique earned it an enduring place on a short short-list of books on the topic.  The Holy Roman Empire had some comparable qualities, and it continued to be reprinted long after it had been superseded as a piece of historical research.  That was surely partly because of its Gibbonian qualities; the character of Bryce’s later work was, alas, obliquely captured by his grumble in 1920 that the great historian of the Roman Empire was ‘not much of a researcher’.
 
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to end without returning to Bryce’s strikingly varied achievements and to Jones’s exemplary account of them.  Bryce was one kind of polymath, and it is characteristic of such figures that they can be a bit intimidating, even tiring.  But that ‘international reputation’ with which we began was fully deserved: he had done so much, over such a long span of time, both in his writings and in his public life.  That makes him a challenge for a modern historian, usually schooled in a particular specialism, but Stuart Jones has met that challenge, dealing authoritatively with all the elements that make up Bryce’s story.  This is an outstanding work of intellectual history, one that can be read with pleasure and profit even by those who may think beforehand that they have little interest in James Bryce.