South Africa, Cape Colony, Natal, Boers, Diamonds cm281

Oriental Rug Review/Asian trade is pleased to offer an original article from Century Magazine. "Impressions of South Africa," by James Bryce. Original article from Century Magazine, Vol. LI, No. 3, July, 1896, 12pp. (loose).

About the Author

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce, OM, GCVO, FRS, PC, FBA (May 10, 1838 – January 22, 1922) was a British jurist, historian and politician. He was the son of James Bryce (LL.D. of Glasgow) and was born at Belfast on May 10 1838. He was educated under his uncle Reuben John Bryce at the Belfast Academy and then continued his education in the University of Glasgow. He went to Trinity College, Oxford, and in 1862 was elected a fellow of Oriel. He went to the bar and practised in London for a few years, but he was soon called back to Oxford as Regius professor of civil law (1870-1893). His reputation as a historian had been made as early as 1864 by his work on the Holy Roman Empire. In 1872 he travelled to Iceland to see the land of the Icelandic sagas as he was a great admirer of Njals saga.

He was an ardent Liberal in politics, and in 1880 he was elected to parliament for the Tower Hamlets constituency of London; in 1885 he was returned for South Aberdeen, where he was re-elected on succeeding occasions and remained a Member of Parliament until 1907. His intellectual distinction and political industry made him a valuable member of the Liberal party. As soon as the late 1860s, he acted as chairman of the royal commission on secondary education. In 1885 he was made Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs but he had to leave office after the electoral defeat of Gladstone in the same year; in 1892 he joined the last cabinet of Gladstone as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, i.e. as Minister without distinct portfolio; in 1894 he was appointed President of the Board of Trade in the new cabinet of Lord Rosebery, but had to leave this office with that whole Liberal cabinet as soon as 1895. After a decade of parliamentary opposition, in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's cabinet in 1905 he was made Chief Secretary for Ireland; but even this time his cabinet post was held only for a brief period, because as soon as February 1907 Bryce was appointed British Ambassador to the United States of America . He kept this diplomatic office until 1913) and was very efficient in strengthening the Anglo-American friendship. The German ambassador in Washington, Graf Heinrich von Bernstorff, later admitted how relieved he felt that Bryce was not his competitor for American sympathies during the World War period, when Bernstorff managed to secure the neutrality of the USA at least until 1917. As an author, Bryce was already well known in America. His work The American Commonwealth (1888) was the first in which the institutions of the United States had been thoroughly discussed from the point of view of a historian and a constitutional lawyer, and it at once became a classic. His Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901) and Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903) were republications of essays, and in 1897, after a visit to South Africa, he published a volume of Impressions of that country, which had considerable weight in Liberal circles when the Second Boer War was being discussed. As member of the Liberal opposition in Parliament, Bryce figured as one of the harshest critics of British repressive policy against Boer civilians in the South African partisan War. Taking the risk of being very unpopular for a certain moment, he condemned the systematic burning of farms and the imprisonment of old people, women and children in British concentration camps

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