as Moulding Public Opinion
81 Classes as Influencing Opinion
82 Local Types of Opinion—East, West, and South
83 The Action of Public Opinion
84 The Tyranny of the Majority
85 The Fatalism of the Multitude
86 Wherein Public Opinion Fails
87 Wherein Public Opinion Succeeds
PART V
Illustrations and Reflections
88 The Tammany Ring in New York City
89 The Philadelphia Gas Ring
90 Kearneyism in California
Epilogue to This and the Two Last Preceding Chapters
91 The Home of the Nation
92 The Latest Phase of Immigration
93 The South Since the War
94 Present and Future of the Negro
95 Further Reflections on the Negro Problem
96 Foreign Policy and Territorial Extension
97 The New Transmarine Dominions
98 Laissez Faire
99 Woman Suffrage
100 The Supposed Faults of Democracy
101 The True Faults of American Democracy
102 The Strength of American Democracy
103 How Far American Experience Is Available for Europe
PART VI
Social Institutions
104 The Bar
105 The Bench
106 Railroads
107 Wall Street
108 The Universities and Colleges
109 Further Observations on the Universities
110 The Churches and the Clergy
111 The Influence of Religion
112 The Position of Women
113 Equality
114 The Influence of Democracy on Thought
115 Creative Intellectual Power
116 The Relation of the United States to Europe
117 The Absence of a Capital
118 American Oratory
119 The Pleasantness of American Life
120 The Uniformity of American Life
121 The Temper of the West
122 The Future of Political Institutions
123 Social and Economic Future
Appendix I
Explanation (by Mr. G. Bradford) of the Nominating Machinery and Its Procedure in the State of Massachusetts
Remarks by Mr. Denis Kearney on “Kearneyism in California”
Appendix II
“The Predictions of Hamilton and de Tocqueville,” by James Bryce
Appendix III
“Bryce’s American Commonwealth: A Review,” by Woodrow Wilson
Appendix IV
“Review of The American Commonwealth,” by Lord Acton
Index
Notes
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.
Chief Justice William Howard Taft
October 12, 1922
James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a classic work, not only of American politics but of political science. 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.
Bryce’s fascination with America began in earnest on his first visit to the United States in 1870. 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. 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.
When The American Commonwealth appeared in 1888, America was the youngest nation in a world still defined by ancient orders. The British Empire bustled beneath Victoria’s scepter and Russia creaked beneath the feudal splendor of Tsar Alexander III. 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 America of Bryce’s observations has long since passed; indeed, it was already gone by the time of his death in 1922. When he first published The American Commonwealth, the population of the entire country, then only thirty-eight states strong, was a mere sixty million;
