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The American Commonwealth - Volume I
First published in 1888, The American Commonwealth was an instant classic, a three-volume set discussing the political structure of American society, its legal system, and its people with an analysis that is both broad and in-depth. Volume I covers the Constitution and the American political system. It discusses the structure of American government and the ways in which the living American government as an entity responds to crisis. The possibilities and power struggles inherent in the American system of government are examined and documented with a fair hand. Bryce goes into further detail about state constitutions and the differing legal structures that exist on a more local level. Anyone with an interest in politics or American history will find Bryce's commentary penetratingly insightful. British historian VISCOUNT JAMES BRYCE (1838-1922) attended the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Oxford. He is best known for his scholarship of the Holy Roman Empire. His popular works include Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901) and Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903).
- GenresAmerican HistoryHistory
740 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1910
About the author
James Bryce
728 books7 followersJames Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce OM GCVO PC FRS FBA, was a British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician.
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July 28, 2026
Is this still the land of democratic vistas? James Bryce, Lord Bryce, to you, British Ambassador to the United States during the presidency of his friend Teddy Roosevelt, was the most acute and generous observer of the American political scene ever to walk our shores. These carefully constructed reflections of how democracy fared in America at the end of the Nineteenth century are provocative, persuasive, and just in time to teach Americans today how to keep their political freedom. Some of his insights, on how political conventions are really giant publicity stunts, for example, are still balls-on-accurate, and others, on how Congressmen suffer from too frequent a rotation of office, seem distant and naive. That is precisely why Bryce is worth reading in the twilight of democracy.
Lord Bryce surveyed the United States between 1884 and 1888, right after that exciting Blaine versus Cleveland presidential contest, or the lull before the lull. This furnished him with two central motifs of his book: Why are Americans stuck with a two-party system where power rotates but the country changes hardly at all? And why do men, not issues, motivate voters to stream to the polls in local, state, and national elections? THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH was composed to answer such questions for a foreign audience. Yet, Americans may profit from taking a second look at features of their political life they take for granted, or wish swept under the rug. Foregoing the dry statistical method favored by political scientists, Bryce relies on personal interviews, first-hand observations, and newspaper accounts to arrive at just plain common-sense conclusions. The reader is forewarned that Bryce shares many of the prejudices of gentlemen of his time. He loathes "ignorant immigrants" in America, especially the Irish, blaming them for big city corruption. Interestingly, Bryce mentions that in a majority of states, alien residents could vote in local elections, and by that very fact tip the national balance of power between parties; a fact nearly unthinkable today and a measure of how America has retrogressed on rights for immigrants. He condescendingly dismisses the fight for female suffrage, and believes Blacks are fit only to be tools of carpetbaggers and scalawags. Bryce, to his credit, takes America to task for its horrific treatment of the Native population, though he's convinced the condition of the Indian tribes is improving.
Lord Bryce comes out swinging. The American Constitution is the greatest instrument ever devised to protect liberty, by entrusting sovereignty in "We the People". Every state constitution echoes this principle. No political institution in America may pass laws contrary to the Federal Constitution. The addition of the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, assures no citizen may suffer under any extrajudicial power. The Fourteenth Amendment, the one Paul Robeson called "the sleeping giant of the Constitution" ensures equal protection and due process under the law for all. The British Parliament, by contrast, holds the right to create new laws, expunge old ones, and dissolve all institutions. Parliament can abolish the Crown, the Church of England, and even itself. How did Americans get so lucky? They inherited the laws and customs of self-government from British Charter companies in Plymouth Bay and Virginia that clearly stated what the Crown and governors could and could not do, and the rights of stockholders. All thirteen colonies eventually chose elected legislatures and some elected Governors. Freedom of religion was enshrined even in colonies that established the Anglican Church. When it came to writing their own Constitution in 1787 Americans were not about to abdicate these freedoms, and to make sure there was no return to royal tyranny adopted a federalist republic which preserved the rights of the states while granting broad powers to the national government to legislate for the common good. Those who don't understand how habituated Americans are to governing themselves don't grasp America. Bryce draws the only rational and rebellious conclusion: In America, when a law or institution is found unconstitutional, it must not be obeyed. The Confederate States tried to overthrow constitutional government, making all their actions illegal. Martin Luther King later followed the spirit of Bryce in violating segregation laws that themselves violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.
Think Americans only recently got stuck with lemons for president? Think again. Uniquely in the Western world, Americans choose their chief executive by popular vote, then clip his wings. The President may introduce legislation, but the most important, on tax and revenue, must originate in the House. He conducts foreign policy, but all treaties must be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. He appoints Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, but their appointments are subject to Congressional approval. The number of jobs he hands out through patronage is small compared to European heads of government. Yet, Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes are the rule among presidents, not the exception. Why do"intellectual pygmies" dominate our politics? Calvin Coolidge, another dud, got it right later: "The business of America is business". Men of high intelligence are found in industry, not presidential politics. The office pays little, and offers few perks, though no chief executive has ever been financially corrupt. America lacks a "political class" of aristocrats who aspire to government office à la Pitt the Elder and Younger; the kind Joseph Heller approvingly said "move into politics out of boredom". The Adams family is the notable outlier. American education is practical, and the surest way to self-deport from politics is to think. The real culprit behind the long list of presidential Salieris is party politics. A candidate who survives the primaries is usually a milquetoast who offends no one and knows everybody, and such men are useless in the White House. Paradoxically, the leveling process of American democracy creates its own fault, keeping the outstanding from standing out. Bryce does not overtly say so, but this is also the reason America has never produced a political philosopher on the rank of Locke, Burke, or the Count de Montesquieu. American political life is insufficiently dramatic or ideological to demand deep thinking.
Bryce's reflections on Congress must be taken by the modern reader with a grain of retroactive salt and a pinch of irony. Most Congressmen accomplish nothing because they are tools of party bigwigs back home who got them elected and, after a term or two, turn the seat over to someone else in reward for services to the party. Congress is really committees, most House votes are pro forma, and the Old Boys network does not like newcomers. Bryce thinks the two-year term for House members is absurd and dangerous for the country. Today, of course, we have the opposite problem. House members are continually re-elected over ninety percent of the time. They can rely on the support of national business and other corporate groups to keep their seats ad infinitum. Bryce grasps the power of Washington lobbyists, but not how they would capture Congressmen in perpetuity. The Senate, then elected by state legislatures, nominally wields more influence, but few Senators dare rise above the concerns of their powerful constituents back home. Direct elections have not changed this baleful picture. Readers will recall Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the "Senator from Boeing", and Joe McCarthy, "the Pepsi-Cola Kid". Congress is no House of Lords or Commons. Just as few gentlemen are attracted to politics in America, political office is not a cachet into high society, and that is another reason why politics attracts a low breed of cats.
Bryce explodes the old cliché that the Supreme Court is "the guardian of the Constitution". Nope. The American people fulfill that role. We are the watchdogs. The function of the Court is to decide which legal issues rise to the status of Constitutional questions and then, based on the will of the people expressed in our Magna Carta, make judgments on what accords with and what violates the Constitution. Almost all cases that reach the high court began in legal disputes between contending parties, the Dred Scott V. Sanford case being an infamous example. That's how it should be. The people themselves must wrangle and tangle first, obtain a fair hearing, and then the case moves slowly upward through the courts and all the way to the highest bench, if necessary. Marbury v. Madison remains the most important case the Court ever considered. Without John Marshall's majority decision that the Court, under the Constitution, has the right to declare a law unconstitutional, the U.S. would be like England: All Congressional laws and presidential orders would be ipso facto legal. Time has proven Bryce right. Tony Blair's creation of a British Supreme Court did not negate the fact that Parliament decides when the rights of the people have been violated.
The great genius of the Constitution lay in reserving for the federal government exclusive rights over the most important national functions, taxation, war, diplomacy, while granting the states all others not so specified. Though they may not know it, Americans are really ruled by state laws. States decide who may vote, the size and shape of legislative districts, state and Congressional, manage disasters, natural and man-made, keep the peace through local police and the National Guard, enact land laws, and by census compose the Electoral College. But, they are not little monarchies. States are bound by their own constitutions and courts. Bryce sees two great threats to liberty and democracy in the states: First, those in the South which have annulled Constitutional protections for the Negro, and second, in the North, the rise of big-city bosses like Tweed in New York City, who have captured the state legislature. Both trends are perilous to the U.S. commonwealth by depriving so many citizens of suffrage.
Bryce sees only philosophical differences between the two major parties. Republicans are the heirs of Hamilton and the Whigs, standing for strong government, sound currency, and high tariffs to protect industry. The Democrats are the children of Jefferson and Jackson, whom Bryce despises, calling the first "anarchic" and the second a "demagogue". They are the party of states' rights, small government, and favor agriculture. When these two parties get into office, Bryce drily notes, both are liable to switch positions. There are Republicans for free trade in New England and protectionist Democrats in Louisiana. Elections in America are vicious precisely on account of that narrow margin between parties. Electoral contests are fought over men, not ideology, and the two parties must whip up a frenzy for their candidate. No one is going to turn out for the polls over protectionism or civil service reform, though these are the two most important issues of the day. Americans are stuck with these two parties for the foreseeable future. Parties based on class, race, region, or religion have no place here, unlike Europe with its workingman's leagues, nationalists, and Catholic parties. No such party can appeal to more than a minority of Americans; and, Americans vote so often for so many offices, local, state, and federal, that no third party can afford the time and money to run that many candidates.
The two big parties aim to elect their men for only one reason. Patronage, the Holy Grail of American politics, is the form corruption takes in the United States. "Jobbing", as Bryce calls it, affords an opportunity for the working class base of both parties to gain a foothold in the middle class and wield minor authority. In return for patronage party stalwarts are expected to canvass for the party and contribute money to political campaigns to get mayors, Congressmen and presidents elected. Minions of the party who make it to elected office often slice off a share of tax revenue to kick back to the political machine that secured their election. Bryce neatly observes that crooked politicians in America seldom take cash payments as in Europe, nor are many voters bought at election time with mullah. The money bribe is too paltry. Rather, elected officials are rewarded with stock in companies they themselves oversee or receive"special favors" from lobbyists like free passage on railroads. The triad of campaign workers-appointed clerks-men of elected office has a tight grip over local and state government, though not the presidency, yet.
This first volume of THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH is highlighted by Bryce's juicy description of presidential political conventions. No American should be naive enough to think that what he sees at these conventions is anything but a facade. The sachems of party machines, the Bosses, pick the delegates in carefully crafted caucuses in their home states. A delegate is a man who has worked his way up the machine by doing favors for the Boss and his clientele. He dares to disobey the Boss in voting his conscience at the convention only on pain of unemployment for himself, family and friends. The Boss will also see to it that newspapers in his state write only favorably on his choice for president. The illusion of unanimity behind the candidate must be maintained. At the convention delegations from the states wheel and deal in favors to arrive at a consensus candidate pleasing to all, like that lion who went to the White House in 1881, James Garfield. This task is, in fact, quite tough, and dozens of ballots are usually necessary. A state delegation may even put up a pretend candidate just to finagle favors from the Bosses. What a contrast to today, with first ballot votes only, followed by unanimous nomination and canned applause. Bryce divides the potential nominees into Favorites, Dark Horses, and Favorite Sons. The disappearance of the last two from consideration by the conventions after 196o is startling. The only thing more bogus than the nomination process is the party platform; really a quilt of promises to all states, factions, and constituencies. Hence, it goes unread by the delegates and no nominee feels bound to its vague clauses.
The chiaroscuro Bryce paints is cause for alarm, yet his Lordship believes fervently in the future of American democracy. The Americans forged a successful union out of thirteen feuding states. They fought a civil war to preserve that union, and brought the defeated South back into the nation on gracious terms. America absorbed and assimilated millions of immigrants and turned them into citizens and voters. Election campaigns are vicious though not violent. Republicans and Democrats do not go for each other's throats when one loses. The suffrage has been extended, though Bryce opposes the vote for women, without stirring up class hatred. Minority opinions and parties, Socialists, Prohibitionists, Grange farmers, Free Silverites (curiously, Bryce does not mention the Populists), do exist, but not serious third parties, and the best these malcontents can hope for is a plank in the platform of a major party. The contrast to Europe is educational. Jews and Catholics could not vote or hold office in Britain until the early Nineteenth century, the French are always fighting between republicans and monarchists, with the threat of a military coup at any moment, and the polyglot empires of the East are held together by despotism. America is, in the Disraeli sense of the word, a conservative country: "I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad". Americans have remained loyal, to the point of death, to the Constitution, federal republic, and legislative democracy. They have also excised the bad; slavery, secessionism, and, in modern times, segregation. This is the essence of public opinion in the United States, and only in America is public opinion the supreme magistrate, including over government itself. On that note, Bryce, and this reviewer, departs for Volume II of THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH.
Bryce elicits from people of color the old question Tonto put to the Lone Ranger: "What do you mean 'we', White Man?". In generalizing about American politics he does not recognize how exceptional the South is in his portrait, and how democracy does not extend to Blacks. Southerners in Bryce's day lived under a one-party state, freedom of speech and press was severely limited, de facto and not de jure, whole swathes of the population had the suffrage stolen from them after the end of Reconstruction, and political violence, often flared, particularly in preventing Black participation in government, down to the post office. This was a national crisis. The Republicans, who controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency agreed to respect and enforce Jim Crow and all-white elections so long as the South stayed out of national politics. Institutionalized racism blocked a true democracy from taking hold in the United States for a century after Emancipation. Race was the one thing Americans, known for their spirit of compromise, were not willing to negotiate, and that ugly note casts Lord Bryce's ode to America in an unpleasant tone.
Lord Bryce surveyed the United States between 1884 and 1888, right after that exciting Blaine versus Cleveland presidential contest, or the lull before the lull. This furnished him with two central motifs of his book: Why are Americans stuck with a two-party system where power rotates but the country changes hardly at all? And why do men, not issues, motivate voters to stream to the polls in local, state, and national elections? THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH was composed to answer such questions for a foreign audience. Yet, Americans may profit from taking a second look at features of their political life they take for granted, or wish swept under the rug. Foregoing the dry statistical method favored by political scientists, Bryce relies on personal interviews, first-hand observations, and newspaper accounts to arrive at just plain common-sense conclusions. The reader is forewarned that Bryce shares many of the prejudices of gentlemen of his time. He loathes "ignorant immigrants" in America, especially the Irish, blaming them for big city corruption. Interestingly, Bryce mentions that in a majority of states, alien residents could vote in local elections, and by that very fact tip the national balance of power between parties; a fact nearly unthinkable today and a measure of how America has retrogressed on rights for immigrants. He condescendingly dismisses the fight for female suffrage, and believes Blacks are fit only to be tools of carpetbaggers and scalawags. Bryce, to his credit, takes America to task for its horrific treatment of the Native population, though he's convinced the condition of the Indian tribes is improving.
Lord Bryce comes out swinging. The American Constitution is the greatest instrument ever devised to protect liberty, by entrusting sovereignty in "We the People". Every state constitution echoes this principle. No political institution in America may pass laws contrary to the Federal Constitution. The addition of the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, assures no citizen may suffer under any extrajudicial power. The Fourteenth Amendment, the one Paul Robeson called "the sleeping giant of the Constitution" ensures equal protection and due process under the law for all. The British Parliament, by contrast, holds the right to create new laws, expunge old ones, and dissolve all institutions. Parliament can abolish the Crown, the Church of England, and even itself. How did Americans get so lucky? They inherited the laws and customs of self-government from British Charter companies in Plymouth Bay and Virginia that clearly stated what the Crown and governors could and could not do, and the rights of stockholders. All thirteen colonies eventually chose elected legislatures and some elected Governors. Freedom of religion was enshrined even in colonies that established the Anglican Church. When it came to writing their own Constitution in 1787 Americans were not about to abdicate these freedoms, and to make sure there was no return to royal tyranny adopted a federalist republic which preserved the rights of the states while granting broad powers to the national government to legislate for the common good. Those who don't understand how habituated Americans are to governing themselves don't grasp America. Bryce draws the only rational and rebellious conclusion: In America, when a law or institution is found unconstitutional, it must not be obeyed. The Confederate States tried to overthrow constitutional government, making all their actions illegal. Martin Luther King later followed the spirit of Bryce in violating segregation laws that themselves violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.
Think Americans only recently got stuck with lemons for president? Think again. Uniquely in the Western world, Americans choose their chief executive by popular vote, then clip his wings. The President may introduce legislation, but the most important, on tax and revenue, must originate in the House. He conducts foreign policy, but all treaties must be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. He appoints Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, but their appointments are subject to Congressional approval. The number of jobs he hands out through patronage is small compared to European heads of government. Yet, Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes are the rule among presidents, not the exception. Why do"intellectual pygmies" dominate our politics? Calvin Coolidge, another dud, got it right later: "The business of America is business". Men of high intelligence are found in industry, not presidential politics. The office pays little, and offers few perks, though no chief executive has ever been financially corrupt. America lacks a "political class" of aristocrats who aspire to government office à la Pitt the Elder and Younger; the kind Joseph Heller approvingly said "move into politics out of boredom". The Adams family is the notable outlier. American education is practical, and the surest way to self-deport from politics is to think. The real culprit behind the long list of presidential Salieris is party politics. A candidate who survives the primaries is usually a milquetoast who offends no one and knows everybody, and such men are useless in the White House. Paradoxically, the leveling process of American democracy creates its own fault, keeping the outstanding from standing out. Bryce does not overtly say so, but this is also the reason America has never produced a political philosopher on the rank of Locke, Burke, or the Count de Montesquieu. American political life is insufficiently dramatic or ideological to demand deep thinking.
Bryce's reflections on Congress must be taken by the modern reader with a grain of retroactive salt and a pinch of irony. Most Congressmen accomplish nothing because they are tools of party bigwigs back home who got them elected and, after a term or two, turn the seat over to someone else in reward for services to the party. Congress is really committees, most House votes are pro forma, and the Old Boys network does not like newcomers. Bryce thinks the two-year term for House members is absurd and dangerous for the country. Today, of course, we have the opposite problem. House members are continually re-elected over ninety percent of the time. They can rely on the support of national business and other corporate groups to keep their seats ad infinitum. Bryce grasps the power of Washington lobbyists, but not how they would capture Congressmen in perpetuity. The Senate, then elected by state legislatures, nominally wields more influence, but few Senators dare rise above the concerns of their powerful constituents back home. Direct elections have not changed this baleful picture. Readers will recall Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the "Senator from Boeing", and Joe McCarthy, "the Pepsi-Cola Kid". Congress is no House of Lords or Commons. Just as few gentlemen are attracted to politics in America, political office is not a cachet into high society, and that is another reason why politics attracts a low breed of cats.
Bryce explodes the old cliché that the Supreme Court is "the guardian of the Constitution". Nope. The American people fulfill that role. We are the watchdogs. The function of the Court is to decide which legal issues rise to the status of Constitutional questions and then, based on the will of the people expressed in our Magna Carta, make judgments on what accords with and what violates the Constitution. Almost all cases that reach the high court began in legal disputes between contending parties, the Dred Scott V. Sanford case being an infamous example. That's how it should be. The people themselves must wrangle and tangle first, obtain a fair hearing, and then the case moves slowly upward through the courts and all the way to the highest bench, if necessary. Marbury v. Madison remains the most important case the Court ever considered. Without John Marshall's majority decision that the Court, under the Constitution, has the right to declare a law unconstitutional, the U.S. would be like England: All Congressional laws and presidential orders would be ipso facto legal. Time has proven Bryce right. Tony Blair's creation of a British Supreme Court did not negate the fact that Parliament decides when the rights of the people have been violated.
The great genius of the Constitution lay in reserving for the federal government exclusive rights over the most important national functions, taxation, war, diplomacy, while granting the states all others not so specified. Though they may not know it, Americans are really ruled by state laws. States decide who may vote, the size and shape of legislative districts, state and Congressional, manage disasters, natural and man-made, keep the peace through local police and the National Guard, enact land laws, and by census compose the Electoral College. But, they are not little monarchies. States are bound by their own constitutions and courts. Bryce sees two great threats to liberty and democracy in the states: First, those in the South which have annulled Constitutional protections for the Negro, and second, in the North, the rise of big-city bosses like Tweed in New York City, who have captured the state legislature. Both trends are perilous to the U.S. commonwealth by depriving so many citizens of suffrage.
Bryce sees only philosophical differences between the two major parties. Republicans are the heirs of Hamilton and the Whigs, standing for strong government, sound currency, and high tariffs to protect industry. The Democrats are the children of Jefferson and Jackson, whom Bryce despises, calling the first "anarchic" and the second a "demagogue". They are the party of states' rights, small government, and favor agriculture. When these two parties get into office, Bryce drily notes, both are liable to switch positions. There are Republicans for free trade in New England and protectionist Democrats in Louisiana. Elections in America are vicious precisely on account of that narrow margin between parties. Electoral contests are fought over men, not ideology, and the two parties must whip up a frenzy for their candidate. No one is going to turn out for the polls over protectionism or civil service reform, though these are the two most important issues of the day. Americans are stuck with these two parties for the foreseeable future. Parties based on class, race, region, or religion have no place here, unlike Europe with its workingman's leagues, nationalists, and Catholic parties. No such party can appeal to more than a minority of Americans; and, Americans vote so often for so many offices, local, state, and federal, that no third party can afford the time and money to run that many candidates.
The two big parties aim to elect their men for only one reason. Patronage, the Holy Grail of American politics, is the form corruption takes in the United States. "Jobbing", as Bryce calls it, affords an opportunity for the working class base of both parties to gain a foothold in the middle class and wield minor authority. In return for patronage party stalwarts are expected to canvass for the party and contribute money to political campaigns to get mayors, Congressmen and presidents elected. Minions of the party who make it to elected office often slice off a share of tax revenue to kick back to the political machine that secured their election. Bryce neatly observes that crooked politicians in America seldom take cash payments as in Europe, nor are many voters bought at election time with mullah. The money bribe is too paltry. Rather, elected officials are rewarded with stock in companies they themselves oversee or receive"special favors" from lobbyists like free passage on railroads. The triad of campaign workers-appointed clerks-men of elected office has a tight grip over local and state government, though not the presidency, yet.
This first volume of THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH is highlighted by Bryce's juicy description of presidential political conventions. No American should be naive enough to think that what he sees at these conventions is anything but a facade. The sachems of party machines, the Bosses, pick the delegates in carefully crafted caucuses in their home states. A delegate is a man who has worked his way up the machine by doing favors for the Boss and his clientele. He dares to disobey the Boss in voting his conscience at the convention only on pain of unemployment for himself, family and friends. The Boss will also see to it that newspapers in his state write only favorably on his choice for president. The illusion of unanimity behind the candidate must be maintained. At the convention delegations from the states wheel and deal in favors to arrive at a consensus candidate pleasing to all, like that lion who went to the White House in 1881, James Garfield. This task is, in fact, quite tough, and dozens of ballots are usually necessary. A state delegation may even put up a pretend candidate just to finagle favors from the Bosses. What a contrast to today, with first ballot votes only, followed by unanimous nomination and canned applause. Bryce divides the potential nominees into Favorites, Dark Horses, and Favorite Sons. The disappearance of the last two from consideration by the conventions after 196o is startling. The only thing more bogus than the nomination process is the party platform; really a quilt of promises to all states, factions, and constituencies. Hence, it goes unread by the delegates and no nominee feels bound to its vague clauses.
The chiaroscuro Bryce paints is cause for alarm, yet his Lordship believes fervently in the future of American democracy. The Americans forged a successful union out of thirteen feuding states. They fought a civil war to preserve that union, and brought the defeated South back into the nation on gracious terms. America absorbed and assimilated millions of immigrants and turned them into citizens and voters. Election campaigns are vicious though not violent. Republicans and Democrats do not go for each other's throats when one loses. The suffrage has been extended, though Bryce opposes the vote for women, without stirring up class hatred. Minority opinions and parties, Socialists, Prohibitionists, Grange farmers, Free Silverites (curiously, Bryce does not mention the Populists), do exist, but not serious third parties, and the best these malcontents can hope for is a plank in the platform of a major party. The contrast to Europe is educational. Jews and Catholics could not vote or hold office in Britain until the early Nineteenth century, the French are always fighting between republicans and monarchists, with the threat of a military coup at any moment, and the polyglot empires of the East are held together by despotism. America is, in the Disraeli sense of the word, a conservative country: "I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad". Americans have remained loyal, to the point of death, to the Constitution, federal republic, and legislative democracy. They have also excised the bad; slavery, secessionism, and, in modern times, segregation. This is the essence of public opinion in the United States, and only in America is public opinion the supreme magistrate, including over government itself. On that note, Bryce, and this reviewer, departs for Volume II of THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH.
Bryce elicits from people of color the old question Tonto put to the Lone Ranger: "What do you mean 'we', White Man?". In generalizing about American politics he does not recognize how exceptional the South is in his portrait, and how democracy does not extend to Blacks. Southerners in Bryce's day lived under a one-party state, freedom of speech and press was severely limited, de facto and not de jure, whole swathes of the population had the suffrage stolen from them after the end of Reconstruction, and political violence, often flared, particularly in preventing Black participation in government, down to the post office. This was a national crisis. The Republicans, who controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency agreed to respect and enforce Jim Crow and all-white elections so long as the South stayed out of national politics. Institutionalized racism blocked a true democracy from taking hold in the United States for a century after Emancipation. Race was the one thing Americans, known for their spirit of compromise, were not willing to negotiate, and that ugly note casts Lord Bryce's ode to America in an unpleasant tone.
October 21, 2016
This book is for anyone who wants to better understand the experiment in democracy that has become our great United States. Every aspect of our local, state, and federal government is covered in great detail from the Declaration of Independence to the turn of the 20th Century (I read the 1914 edition). It was interesting to learn Bryce's views on Lincoln, the Civil War, and how our Constitution served as the navigational guide. I particularly valued the Part V Chapters on Public Opinion, Colleges & Universities, and voter suffrage.
This is a very academic read that causes reflection and further study. It took me almost a year to read (keep in mind I was reading other books at the same time), but it is well worth the investment. Every leader who wants to serve their community, state, and nation positively and significantly should read this book.
This is a very academic read that causes reflection and further study. It took me almost a year to read (keep in mind I was reading other books at the same time), but it is well worth the investment. Every leader who wants to serve their community, state, and nation positively and significantly should read this book.
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