![]() ![]() When he first published The American Commonwealth, the population of the entire country, then only thirty-eight states strong, was a mere sixty million New York took the lead with 5,082,871, while California boasted a meager 864,694 spread across its 155,980 square miles. The America of Bryce’s observations has long since passed indeed, it was already gone by the time of his death in 1922. The devastation of the Great War and the loss of innocence it would bring was more than a quarter of a century away Lenin was but a schoolboy of eighteen, and Hitler would not be born until 1889. The British Empire bustled beneath Victoria’s scepter and Russia creaked beneath the feudal splendor of Tsar Alexander III. When The American Commonwealth appeared in 1888, America was the youngest nation in a world still defined by ancient orders. The America of which Bryce first took note was a geographically sprawling society kept only loosely in touch by telegraph and newspapers-telephones and radios being still decades away. It is worth remembering that the country he first saw was only five years past the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and but a year after the first transcontinental railway had been completed it would be another seven years before the last of the federal troops of Reconstruction were finally withdrawn from the South in 1877. ![]() Eschewing the theoretical depths of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville had plumbed, and lacking the partisan purposes for which Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues had penned The Federalist, Bryce sought to capture the America of his time, to present “within reasonable compass, a full and clear view of the facts of today.” 1 As Bryce’s biographer would later put it, The American Commonwealth “was a photograph taken and exhibited by a political philosopher, not a history, not a picture of what was, not an account of how it had come to be.” 2 But, as with photographs that aspire to art, the more one studies Bryce’s snapshot of a long-vanished America, the more one sees.īryce’s fascination with America began in earnest on his first visit to the United States in 1870. James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a classic work, not only of American politics but of political science. He knew us better than we know ourselves, and he went about and among us and gave us the boon of his illuminating wisdom derived from the lessons of the past. ![]()
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