Conclusion

Bryce's commentary on Irish affairs all but disappeared after the failure of the second home rule attempt in 1893. In 1899 he still seems to have held some degree of hope for home rule,^[1251] ^{^[1252] but by 1919 conditions had worsened to the point where he thought home rule would not be enough to appease the Na- tionalists.9В° By that point home rule had actually been endorsed in parliament five years earlier, but the immediate onset of war made it necessary to postВpone implementation.}

During the War, and largely because of it, however, the mood in Ireland had changed, so that by 1919 home rule was no longer acceptВable to the Nationalists. The next two years saw Ireland secede from the UK entirely. In an ironic twist, it was Bryce who introduced the 1921 Treaty with the Irish Free State into the House of Lords, to which he had been elevated in 1913.9^[1253]

How should we understand Bryce's role in the home rule campaign? It cerВtainly must be understood in political terms. Bryce was a committed Liberal who also had Gladstone to thank for his early appointment to the Regius Chair. These factors and any career ambitions certainly are relevant to his campaignВing for home rule. But it also needs to be understood in the context of his intelВlectual and scholarly pursuits. Bryce the politician was also Bryce the historian and jurist. Like the many other scholar-statesmen of Victorian Britain, Bryce modulated. What he could argue clearly and forcefully in parliament and on the stump he could only subtly intimate in his scholarship. A prime example can be found in his essay on вЂ?Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces'. Remarking on the vices and virtues of federalism to absorb destructive вЂ?centrifugal' forces in a political community, Bryce wrote, вЂ?Whether a similar contrivance might not have been profitably employed within the British Isles in A.D.

1782, or in A.D. 1800, or again later, is a question which will already have presented itself to one who has followed the argument thus far'^[1254] Modulation notwithstanding, a thread of unity is clearly discernible between his political utterances and his scholarship. In a certain sense he created his own constraints. The concept of constitutional flexibility captured a broadly acknowledged feature of the BritВish constitution, but it was still BryceвЂ™s contribution. Once adopted as common currency, it became a hurdle in the way of BryceвЂ™s argument for home rule. Home rule would compromise the constitutionвЂ™s flexibility on a practical level: legislating for Ireland would become morally unacceptable. But the lesson Bryce gleaned from his study of the flexible constitution of ancient Rome was how the voluntary assumption of moral constraints provided for the survival of constitutions. That he traversed so seamlessly from Roman history to curВrent British politics makes sense in light of the historiographical outlook he inherited from Freeman: where periodisations like вЂ?ancientвЂ™ and вЂ?modernвЂ™ give way to a vast unity, the constitutional experience of eons past bears directly on the present.

In light of all this, this chapter makes two propositions. First, political thought cannot always be so neatly separated from legal thought, particularly when it comes to the debates in the House of Commons about the constitution of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Debates about parliamentary sovereignty in the Victorian period, when so easily could constitutions become the playthings of party politics, were almost always carried out under the conВstraints of jurisprudence, and expressed in a language of legalese that was not always a feature of debates on other legislative issues. The instrument they worked to shape, in the process, was statute. Watching on, jurists working in the courts or in the universities and operating, therefore, in different instituВtional settings, were often made to reconsider parliamentary sovereignty withВin the scope of a changing Victorian administrative system and in response to the political developments that were taking place around them.

They were asked to interpret parliamentary statutes in such a context. Legal thought was therefore often political, and political thought was often legal. Second, neither bodies of thought can be understood in isolation from underlying presumpВtions about the nature of history. It was because of his belief in what Freeman called the unity of history that Bryce found in Roman history both a constituВtional analogue for Britain and a cautionary tale of the use of power under a flexible constitution. Ideas about history are equally crucial to the history of ideas. Historiography is intelligible only against the backdrop of contemporary politics, as Pocock has argued consistently throughout his career, and BryceвЂ™s writings on constitutions and Roman history are no exception here.^[1255]

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Source: Cavanagh Edward (ed.). Empire and Legal Thought: Ideas and Institutions from Antiquity to Modernity. Brill,2020. вЂ” 634 p.. 2020

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