[1st Viscount]. British jurist, historian, politician and diplomatist, son of James Bryce (LL.D. of Glasgow, who had a school in Belfast for many years); born at Belfast, Ireland, on the 10th of May 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 Holy Roman Empire. He was an ardent Liberal in politics, and in 1880 he was elected to parliament for the Tower Hamlets division 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 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 (1905) he was made chief secretary for Ireland; but in February 1907 he was appointed British ambassador at Washington, 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 Mr. Birrell. As a man of letters Mr. Bryce was already well known in America. His great work The American Commonwealth (1888; revised edition, 1910) 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 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.
He remained in the United States as British ambassador till 1913, a period of six years. 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 Great Britain. For the first time Great Britain responded in kind. Mr. Bryce, already favourably regarded in America as the author of a classical work on 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 rôle of public orator on matters outside party politics, so far as his diplomatic duties permitted. These duties he performed to the satisfaction of his own Government and the Government to which he was accredited. The difficulty between America and Newfoundland about fisheries was referred to the Hague Tribunal for final settlement. 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. He was criticised, both in England and in Canada, for forwarding, in 1911, in the course of his duties as ambassador, an arrangement for reciprocity between the two North American states; but the general election, which substituted Sir R. Borden as Prime Minister of Canada for Sir W. Laurier, put an end to the negotiations. 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.
For his services he was created a viscount in 1913, and in 1914 his old university, Oxford, gave him an honorary degree. Along with other English scholars, who had ties of close association with German learning and German savants, he was extremely reluctant in the last days of July 1914 to contemplate the possibility of war with Germany; but the violation of Belgian neutrality and the outrages committed in Belgium by German troops brought him speedily into line with national feeling. He was appointed chairman of a strong committee to consider the evidence of such outrages not only in Belgium but in France; and his report convinced the most incredulous of the reality of the charges. He welcomed warmly the entrance of the Americans into the war in the spring of 1917. He also presided, as an eminent constitutional lawyer, over a committee set up in that year to consider the reconstruction of the House of Lords, and spent much labour in a task which all parties were disposed to shirk. During these latter years he was largely engaged on the composition of a valuable book, published in two substantial volumes, in 1921, on Modern Democracies, a comparative study of a certain number of popular governments in their actual working. For this monumental work he had been gathering material for several years before the war. Besides visiting Switzerland and other parts of Europe, he availed himself of his experiences in the United States and in Canada, and journeyed to Spanish America, Australia and New Zealand. Lord Bryce married, in 1880, Elizabeth Marion, daughter of Thomas Ashton, of Hyde, and sister of the 1st Lord Ashton of Hyde. He was appointed O.M. in 1907 and G.C.V.O. in 1918. See also “The Position of Women in the United States,” “The Ascent of Ararat,” “The Work of the Roman Empire,” “On the Government of Ireland Bill,” “Democracy and Civic Duty.” (See authored articles: Justinian I., Theodora, Tribonian.)
