James Bryce
James Bryce was born in Belfast on 10 May 1838, into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and received his education at Belfast Royal Academy, the University of Glasgow, and Trinity College. That grounding across institutions in Ireland and Britain shaped a career that would stretch across law, scholarship, teaching, politics, and diplomacy, all conducted in English.
Bryce worked as a barrister, legal counselor, university teacher, historian, and writer before entering the House of Commons in 1880, where he represented Tower Hamlets and South Aberdeen for the Liberal Party until 1907. He served as President of the Board of Trade and, in 1895, chaired the Royal Commission on Secondary Education. His most noted written work was The American Commonwealth, published in 1888, a study that drew on his deep engagement with political life on both sides of the Atlantic. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the British Academy, and received the Order of Merit, the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.
From 1907 to 1913 Bryce served as British ambassador to the United States, a posting that historian H. A. L. Fisher described as making him "the most successful ambassador who has ever represented Great Britain at Washington." He died on 22 January 1922 in Sidmouth.
Quotes by James Bryce
Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its existence.
Three-fourths of the mistakes a man makes are made because he does not really know what he thinks he knows.
No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life’s course by a mere accident.
The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls ‘magnetic,’ and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge.
In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent, splendid Nature...
The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls 'magnetic,' and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge.
Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.
