Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/230

222 and natural simplicity of manner, which enabled him to talk easily and associate readily with all the men whom he met. All the qualities of his mind conspired to win him instant and lasting success in the years in which he was ambassador at Washington. Americans honoured the encyclopaedic range of the scholar: they admired the observer who had written the classical work on their own commonwealth; they had an affection for the man himself, with whom it was so easy to talk, on a footing of simple equality, whether at receptions, or in clubs, or in the Pullman car of the railway train, or in any other place where men were gathered together. He was simple in a land that loved simplicity; and of all the phases of his political activity that of his embassy was perhaps the one in which all his gifts worked most harmoniously together to achieve an unparalleled success.

In the pages of this Review it is fitting that Lord Bryce should be more especially mentioned as a political observer and as an historian. As a political observer he had for his forerunners Montesquieu and Tocqueville, as he has for his successor (if we may speak of a successor) Mr. Lawrence Lowell, the author of a work on the Government of England which gives back to England in good measure what Lord Bryce gave to America in his volumes on the American Commonwealth. The cultivation of this field of descriptive politics is a matter of no small moment in the modern world. To explain to one country the genius of the institutions of another is to act as an intellectual ambassador, and to lay the foundations of international understanding. There is an internal logic which connects the work of Lord Bryce as a master of descriptive politics both with his embassy at Washington and with his labours in later years in the cause of a League of Nations. He was, indeed, following the most native and the most strongly marked of all his inclinations when he wrote on the institutions of other lands the United States, France, Switzerland, South Africa, and South America; for here the traveller was at one with the scholar, as the scholar was at one with the statesman. Not only had he, as a traveller, seen what he described face to face; not only did he, as a scholar, know the past of what he described, and the past of other things similar: he had also, as a statesman, played his part in active politics, and he knew with an internal knowledge the actual working of institutions. His books in this field must remain for long years the original and authoritative sources from which scholars will draw their accounts of the nature of the political institutions of a large part of the world at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

In political theory, as distinct from political institutions, he was less interested and less versed. There are pregnant passages