BIOGRAPHY OF BRYCE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3379, 20 June 1927, Page 7

BIOGRAPHY OF BRYCE.

THE EDUCATED TO BLAME?

As a . University student reading history I cut my teeth on Bryce’s “Holy Roman Empire” and there still remains with me the thrill it engendered with its masterly survey in one compact volume of that great power fading in one day into that simulcrum of its former glory, the Hapsburg Empire. A life of Lord Bryce, therefore, by Mr H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, just issued by Macmillan, is a work to which I turned joyfully. It is a work one wishes to read at leisure and savour to the full, so for a first notice I propose to select only that portion which deals with Lord Bryce’s visits to Australia and New Zealand prior to his writing “Modern Democracies. ’ ’

There is a chapter entitled “A Glimpse of Australasia” Mr Fisher does not apparently abjure the use of that portmanteau term for the two island democracies at the Antipodes. In pursuit of his idea, first born in 1904, of writing a text on modern democracies, it was not until 1912 that Professor Bryce, ns he was then, actually went there. Here is how Professor Fisher describes it;—

“The Labour Party was in power in Australia. For the first time in history apart from moments of revolution, the hand-workers of a country had obtained effective control of the Executive. Hero then was a new phenomenon of great and wide-reaching significance and not a little disconcerting to the Liberal statesmen of orthodox Gladstonian views. What had come about in Australia in 1919 might be copied in other democracies. Europe, too, might experience, in less favourable circumstances, proletarian iulc and Siam socialism. The change was too recent to enable a confident estimate to be made of its bearings. Prima facie, however, the Government-by a class for a class, even were that class the largest in the community, was not attractive. To Bryce class government in any form or shape had always appeared to be unsound, and he was not tempted to revise his opinion of it by what he saw in America. Yet, deficient in elevation as he found Australian political life to be, he was compelled to acknowledge that the stream of change continued to flow in the well worn channels of Parliamentary constitutionalism; and in the virile energy and sanguine temper of the Australian people he found some compensation for the lack of inspiration in Australian politics and for the selfish materialism of proletarian rule.” The biographer gives a charming personal turn to the narrative when he quotes Lord Chelmsford, then Governor of New South Wales, who said of the distinguished traveller: “Two things stand out in my memory, the first his masterly handling of the press reporters. It was late when he arrived at our house after a tiriug journey and many young men were waiting eager to flush their pens upon him. I heard of this and said to him, ‘You must be tired, let me get rid of them.’ ‘Oh! no, by no means,’ he said, ‘I will see them.’ So arrangements were made and Bryce took in hand some half dozen young men. After half ail hour of* so, it being time to dress for dinner, I went in to rescue him and found him sitting on a sofa faced by a band of gaping young fellows, enjoying himself to the full. In the space of half an hour he had crossquestioned them on every conceivable subject and they, though full of admiration, had no more spirit left in them, One of them said to me afterwards, ‘The Professor never gave us a chance of putting him a question.’ “The other tiling I remember was his extraordinary kindness to my children. They were all young then, the eldest not being more than sixteen. I arranged for a day’s "expedition to the National Park where he might botanisc to the full of his bent. My wife and I were engaged, so two or three of my girls went with him and Mrs Bryce. They came home delighted. He had known every flower and plant, and told them all about them. But what pleased them, I think, most was his activity. ‘You know, Dad, he skipped from rock to rock like a mountain goat and never missed his footing.’ ”

And Professor Bryce was then in his seventy-fourth year ! Ills biographer goes on to describe how Professor Bryce had visited Hawaii and climbed Manna Loa in 1883 but had had no knowledge of the South Pacific, and there they went accordingly, after Bryce’s skilful campaign of inquiry—"Wherever he went, Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart, men of every calling were brought into contribution lawyers, politicians, pressmen, scholars in the first place, but also industrials and farmers. The political philosopher returned across the Pacific with a rich booty from his lightning raid,” —he and Mrs Bryce explored Tahiti “walking into the heart of the mountains for some five miles along a trail through a tropical forest, with wild oranges and limes, mangoes, coffee and bananas and the ferns around us.” and visited the little-known Cook and Society Islands on the way out and on the return voyage touched at Tutuela and Honolulu. These lovely little islands, with thencoral reefs and light green lagoons of an exquisite transparency, their long rows of cocoa nut palms tossing their feathery plumes in the breeze, their romantic mountains and gentle aborigines could not, hided, be brought to contribute to the magnum ojius on “Modern Democracies.” But for the student of life upon this planet what could be more attractive than a vision of miniature world, so secluded and select before the last remnants of primitive belief and custom had been obliterated by Chinese immigration and the Christian missions ? To feed on the native dishes, to listen to the native songs, to be present at the ceremonal brewing of the Kaba, to be entertaned by the last of the Tava clan (descended on the male side from a shark), to watch the unearthly brilliance of the dawn, to brave the dancing surf in a light canoe, or to plunge under the warm Trade wind into a cool mountain stream, could any other combination of experiences be more entrancing ‘1 Even the fish in the Aquarium at Honololu were not as other fish. ‘There were,’ writes Mrs Bryce, “fish looked like birds, or snakes or rocks; fish that looked like velvet or silk—ci perfect sea garden of colour or design.’ ” There is a chapter devoted to The Peace, the League and the United States, in which the biographer quotes a number of letters which Professor Bryce wrote to Dr Charles' W. Eliot, with whom he carried ou an active correspondence. It is in one of these letters that the only other specific reference to New Zealand occurs in this biography in which he indicts the educated class for such failure of democracy as wo have witnessed. “What struck me,” wrote Professor Bryce, “in those countries was the total want of appreciation of the need for knowledge, for clear vision, and for hard thinking, in those who lead the new democracies. The so-called ‘educated classes’ in those countries and in Canada, and to some extent in the United States, have not risen to a sense of their duty. Where democracies

d° not succeed, it is quite as much the tauJt of the educated as of the uneducated classes.

To round off this somewhat one-sided notice of a deeply interesting book, one may, in view of the position to-day. quote the rest of this letter to Dr Eliot:— If some of my views seem pessimistic, you must remember that I have been living in Europe, and that I remember Eng land as she was in the days of Peel and Gladstone, when a higher and finer spirit pervaded public life than is now the case here. If America has gone up, I believe she has—end your view of her progress is most cheering to me—England has gone down. The decadence may be temporary, but there it is. There is not one of my friends who survive from the generation of 1850 to 1880 who would not speak more gloomily than I have ventured to speak. Italy was the country for which we hoped most from freedom, and Italy is the country which is now ruled by a set of politicians, largely corrupt at home, selfish and unscrupulous in their foreign policy. France is little, if at all, better. In the chapters on France I have not ventured to say, because I cauld not prove, much that I believe to be true about the want of scruple of the politicians and the venality of the Press. In fact, the power of the I ress seems the greatest danger ahead of democracy. The people mean well, but if false facts and misleading views are continually drummed into them, how can they judge aright. • In this respect 1 see little comfort through the diffusion of reading. European countries are at present pervaded by sentiments of hatred, ready to break out again into war. The cosmopolitan sentiment is no stronger than it was—indeed weaker than in 1860 class selfishness is intense, and in some countries has become class hatred. The British Government is behaving worse in Ireland than it has ever behaved there before 1798. We are horrified at what is going on there, and yet the Parliamentary majority supports the Government in its worst acts, and it is hard to stir the mass of the people out of their apathy. “Nevertheless, I do find comfort in Switzerland. It does prove that you can have a Government thoroughly popular, and yet pure, intelligent, and patriotic. Similarly, disappointed as we are with the way in which the United States people have failed to support the ideas embodied in the League of Nations, the improvement in the tone of public life and in the government of cities, which used to be your reproach, is so marked that one can again feel about America as men felt in the days when yours was the one country which set an example of constitutionaal freedom.”

Do we still echo this, a six-year-old survey ? Stands America where it did then ?