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his 'Studies in History and Jurisprudence,' Bryce laid some shrewd blows on the dry and narrow dogmas of the so-called analytical school in which our law-students were trained until the other day, so far as they were trained at all. His treatment of the Hobbist doctrine of indivisible sovereignty is to my mind a full and final refutation.

It is not possible here to account, even in the most summary manner, for the contents of 'The Holy Roman Empire'; it would be superfluous in any case to deal thus with a book which has long been in the hands of all historical students, which invites them to further exploration, and to which they return to appreciate more fully the finer points of scholarship and apt illustration that escape the novice. A man is equipped for such appreciation only when he knows his Dante (including the De Monarchia) at first hand, has tasted the Schoolmen, can use Du Cange, is no stranger to Italian cities, and has learnt something of medieval architecture and art; and, if he has made such progress in res diplomatica that he can read a medieval charter with understanding, so much the better. The days are past, I suppose-thanks largely to Bryce-when a college archivist, presumably competent in purely English matters, reading 'nos Ricardus Dei gratia' at the head of a grant, could promptly docket it as of Richard I. In fact the next significant words were 'rex Romanorum' and the grantor was Richard of Cornwall.

A specially pleasing chapter of 'The Holy Roman Empire' is entitled 'Imperial Titles and Pretensions.' Here one may learn why Hungary was still outside the Empire when the Archdukes of Austria were apostolic Kings of Hungary as well as Emperors; why it was strictly proper for the Emperor to be crowned four times over in four several cities; and how Frederick Barbarossa drove his Eastern rival Isaac Angelus of Constantinople, who had begun with calling him chief prince of Alemannia, to address him in due form as the most noble Emperor of ancient Rome. Even Bryce's insight could not enable him to prophesy, when he last revised his book, that the name of empire would disappear from Europe in his lifetime.

On his opus magnum, 'The American Commonwealth,' I shall not venture to pass any judgment of my own. Vol. 237.-No. 471.

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If there is any European qualified by similar experience to discuss that book on terms of equality, it is M. Jusserand, who moreover was intimately acquainted with Bryce's work as a colleague; and he is not free. Rather I will cite a thoroughly competent American witness whose testimony I had the pleasure of hearing at the time. In 1907, when Bryce had lately taken up his post as our ambassador, he was invited to give the annual address to the meeting of the American Bar Association at Portland, Maine. Judge Alton B. Parker of New York, the President of the Association for the year, introduced him in these words:

'I will not say that in all England there cannot be found a man who has mastered our dual system of government so completely as has the distinguished author of "The American Commonwealth," but I will say that neither in England nor in any other country has any man produced such conclusive evidence of mastery as he. His broad comprehension of our ideals, coupled with his careful and considerate treatment of our failures sometimes to meet those ideals, has aroused in us an interest and stimulated for him a friendship which has grown until it is national in its scope. So, when he came to us as the representative of that great Government to which the ancestors of a majority of the people present this morning at some time owed allegiance, we received him with 3 warm feeling, with a great welcome, because he had a warn place in our hearts.' *

The title of the address was 'The influence of national character and historical environment in the development of the Common Law'; but the matter was so handled as to bring out, as was fitting for a good lawyer speaking among lawyers, the importance of the legal element in the common stock of British and American political tradition. Bryce rightly pointed out that even the archaic technicality of our law had its virtues at the time when rules had to be technical if judgments were not to be arbitrary and arguments confused. (There comes a point, no doubt, where excess of technicality has bred subtle evasions, and the rules and exceptions between them get into a hopeless tangle; nevertheless there are

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Report of the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the American Bar Association, Baltimore, 1907,' p. 79.

a few American States in whose courts procedure is much what it was in England two centuries ago.) If Bryce's distinctly legal papers could be isolated, the exactness as well as the range of his professional knowledge would, I think, surprise many lawyers.

Not that 'The American Commonwealth' (to return from a slight digression) is at all like a law-book, or is even a wholly political book. It is, of course, a treatise on American constitutional Government, Federal and State, but it is much more. The last two hundred and fifty pages or so deal freely with American life in its professional, academic, commercial, and other social aspects; and whoever will read those chapters may see that Bryce did not win his reputation among Americans by flattery but by combining human sympathy with frankness. As he has himself said, it is a great mistake to suppose (whatever may have been the case when Tocqueville wrote) that Americans resent criticism. What they will not endure, nor yet our fellow-citizens of the Dominion, for that matter, is being patronised. Now Bryce could not have assumed an air of patronage if he had tried; and that was part of his secret. There is only one topic on which I have looked for discussion in The American Commonwealth' without finding satisfaction; it is the general respect for learning in the United States, quite contrary to vulgar notions of democratic temper. This is barely touched upon in the admirable chapters on American universities. But perhaps the answer is that we should consider not why lezing is so much respected in America but rather why it is so little respected in England as compared not only with America but with other lettered European countries including Scotland; and maybe Bryce, as a Scotsman, did not feel troubled by that puzzle.

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The quite recent book on 'Modern Democracies' is a sequel to 'The American Commonwealth,' covering new ground on similar lines as well as supplementing the former judgments of American affairs with the aid of later experience. Less than a year ago Sir Charles Oman gave an account of it in this Review; and there is nothing for me to say now but to repeat with full agreement his remark that it is a marvellous book to have been written by a man of eighty-three.

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Apart from Bryce's great monographs, the best proof of his eminence as a publicist may be found in the two volumes of 'Studies in History and Jurisprudence published in 1901, about midway in time between The American Commonwealth' and 'Modern Democracies.' They cover a wide 'field, but there is a common motive to be found in most of them, as the preface points out— 'that of a comparison between the history and law of Rome and the history and law of England.' Having myself at sundry times gone over much of the same ground from a slightly different point of view, for legal rather than historical purposes, I can bear witness with some confidence to the soundness and accuracy of Bryce's workmanship. The writer's mastery of style and his admirably ordered exposition may be said to speak for themselves; and yet not wholly so, for only a reader who has made his own laborious acquaintance with the matter of these essays in the rough can appreciate the skill and felicity that reduced it to literary form.

Save for a few discussions of which the subject-matter has in one way or another now lost its importance, almost every section of the book may be recommended at this day as a lucid and impartial survey of its topic, neither superficial nor over-technical, omitting nothing material to be known by an inquirer, and neither concealing nor exaggerating the difficulties. Many of the lessons thus conveyed are as much needed at this day as ever they were. There might have been fewer disillusions in Europe, and perhaps less trouble in some other parts of the world, if Bryce's essay on 'Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces' had been familiar to the politicians who were talking of self-determination' a few years ago as if it were a universal solvent of boundary problems. There they might have read a wise man's estimate of the disruptive forces engendered in a mixed population, even under tolerably good material conditions, in the chronic conflict of language, tradition, and religion; they might have learnt that tribal and national passions are exceedingly complex products of human nature not to be controlled by diplomatic or legal formulas.

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This essay, however, is of less general importance than that which precedes it, entitled 'Flexible and Rigid Constitutions,' which is a classical monograph in

miniature. Bryce was the first author who clearly distinguished those political constitutions which can be changed by the ordinary forms of legislation from those which can be amended only by a special process, and fixed on that distinction the apt terms 'flexible' and 'rigid.' He was well aware that the distinction need not always represent a substantial difference, as President Lowell has more fully explained. Not all rigid constitutions are equally rigid; the prescribed mode of amendment may be more or less dilatory, more or less elaborate. In some cases it may add only a little solemnity and delay to the procedure of current legislation. We have seen, on the other hand, that even the cautious provisions devised by the founders of the United States leave it possible for organised agitation to carry through drastic innovations on a wave of real or apparent popular sentiment without effective opposition. As to our own affairs, it is plain that Bryce did not believe the problem of organising the British Empire to be soluble by any form of rigid constitution; and later events have amply justified his doubt. It is hardly needful to add that the importance of the whole subject is increased by the recent birth of so many new sovereign States in Europe, whose constitutions, it may be presumed, will belong to the rigid type. This again is foreseen in a general way in the closing paragraphs.

Bryce is at his very best in the chapter on 'Primitive Iceland,' where the imagination of the historical scholar is reinforced by the keen eye of the traveller who has himself been over the ground and qualified himself to appreciate the topographical reasons for fixing the meeting-place of the Althing at one spot rather than another.

"There was plenty of water and pasture (he says), and the lake which washed the plain of meeting abounded (as it does to this day) with trout and wild fowl. (It abounds also with most pernicious small black flies, whereon the trout grow fat, but which make fishing not always a pleasure.)'

It is rather amusing to remember the days when journalists who did not agree with Bryce's political opinions treated him as belonging to the genus of merely book-learned doctrinaire professors. Those university

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