Viscount James Bryce Bryce

“ But the measured force with which every sentence was launched, like a shell hurtling through the air, the concentrated intensity of his look, as he defied antagonists in front and swept his glance over the ranks of his supporters around and behind him, had a startling and thrilling power which no other Englishman could exert, and which no Englishman had exerted since the days of Pitt and Fox. The whole proud, bold, ardent nature of the man seemed to flash out, and one almost forgot what the lips said in admiration of the towering personality. ”

“ But be sure that, by God’s special help, I will do my best to encourage others to die manly. I will also look for God’s help for myself to die as a Christian. May this country see that, if we cannot live here as men, we can die as men. May many die as men of God. May God forgive this nation all their sin which they do without knowing. May the Armenians teach Jesus’ life by their death, which they could not teach by their life or have failed in showing forth. It is my great desire to see a Reverend Ali, or Osman, or Mohammed. May Jesus soon see many Turkish Christians as the fruit of his blood. ”

“ When the storm cleared away, what a melancholy sight was this little grassy basin strewn with loose stones, and bearing in its midst the graves of the British dead enclosed within a low wall! A remote and silent place, raised high in air above the vast, bare, brown country which stretched away east, south, and west without a trace of human habitation. A spot less likely to have become the scene of human passion, terror and despair can hardly be imagined. ”

“ There I saw him in the end of December, fresh and keen as ever, aware that the most he could hope for was to live long enough to complete his Conquest, but eagerly reading every new book that came to him from England, starting schemes for various historical treatises sufficient to fill three life-times, and ranging in talk over the whole field of politics, literature, and history. It seemed as if the intellect and will, which strove to remain till their work was done, were the only things which held the weak and wasted body together. ”

“ I have seen many wild islands in many stormy seas, and some of them more bare and forbidding than this, but never any inhabited spot that seemed so entirely desolate and solitary and featureless. There was nothing for the eye to dwell upon, no lake, no river, no mountain,—only scattered and shapeless hills,—a land without form or expression, yet with a certain simple and primitive beauty in the colours of the yellow grass and grey-blue rocks, shining through clear air, with the sea-wind singing over them. ”

“ But when an occasion arrived which quickened men’s pulses, and particularly when some sudden storm burst on the House of Commons, a place where the waves rise as fast as in a mountain lake under a squall rushing down a glen, the vehemence of his feeling found expression in the fire of his eye and the resistless strength of his words. His utterance did not grow swifter, nor did the key of his voice rise, as passion raises and sharpens it in most men. ”

“ Having spent some hours in examining them, we were just starting when a swarm of locusts passed, the first we had seen. It is a strange sight, beautiful if you can forget the destruction it brings with it. The whole air, to twelve or even eighteen feet above the ground, is filled with the insects, reddish brown in body, with bright gauzy wings. When the sun's rays catch them it is like the sea sparkling with light. When you see them against a cloud they are like the dense flakes of a driving snow-storm. You feel as if you had never before realized immensity in number. ”

“ We are now more than halfway to the Pacific and may pause to survey the landscape. Though there is moisture everywhere, one sees no water, for neither ocean is visible, the Chagres is hidden among the folds of the hills, and the brooks at the valley bottoms are insignificant. But otherwise it is cheerful and pleasant in its bright green and its varied lines,—a country in which a man might be content to live, faintly reminding one of the Trossachs in Scotland by the number of steep little peaks crowded together and by the profusion of wood. ”

“ He calls his lady-love a breeze of spring, and himself a thirsty flower, but a flower on which only a hot southern blast is ever blowing, so that his love-thirst continually endures. He likens his mistress to the radiant heavenly bodies—the sun, moon, and stars—but her light is stronger than that of all other luminaries, for it alone can illumine his darkened heart. ”

“ As I stand at my window in the morning I see one after another of the little bodies carried by, wrapped mostly in a ragged piece of patch-work; and the condition of the living is more pitiful than that of the dead—hungry, ragged, dirty, sick, cold, wet, swarming with vermin—thousands of them! Not for all the wealth of all the rulers of Europe would I bear for one hour their responsibility for the suffering and misery of this one little corner of the world alone. A helpless, unarmed Christian community turned over to the sword and the passion of Islam! ”

“ How did a man, whatever his natural gifts, who was weighted in his course by such disadvantages as Disraeli’s, by his Jewish origin, by the escapades of his early career, by the want of confidence which his habitual cynicism inspired, by the visionary nature of so many of his views,—how did he, in a conservative and aristocratic country like England, triumph over so many prejudices and enmities, and raise himself to be the head of the Conservative and aristocratic party, the trusted counsellor of the Crown, the ruler, almost the dictator, of a free people? ”

“ Gladstone has been like a sun which, sinking slowly, has grown larger as he sank, and filled the sky with radiance even while he trembled on the verge of the horizon. There were able men, and famous men, but there was no one comparable to him in power and fame and honor. Now he is gone. The piercing eye is dim, and the mellow voice is silent, and the light has died out of the sky. ”

“ We step out, and have before us a view, the like of which we had never seen before. In front, looking eastward, was a wide plain of sand and pebbles with loose piles and shattered ridges of black rock rising here and there from its surface, all shimmering in the sunlight. Beyond the plain, thirty miles away, is a long line of red and grey mountains, their sides all bare, their crags pierced by deep, dark gorges, so that they seem full of shadows. ”

“ The chief charm of travel through a new country is the curiosity which the thought of its future inspires. In South Africa, a land singularly unlike any part of Europe or of North America, this curiosity is keenly felt by the visitor. When he begins to speculate on the future, his first question is, Will these wildernesses ever become peopled, as most of North America and a large part of Australia have now been peopled, and if so, what will be the character of the population? Will South Africa become one of the great producing or manufacturing countries of the world? ”

“ The Armenian, robbed of his life, his goods, his honour, conveys to you his last cry for help—help to save the lives of the survivors! Money to buy them bread! There is a rumour here that the Government will allow the women and the children under seventeen years of age to leave the country. How are they to do it? Where are they to go? What ship is to take them? Who will provide the funds? From moment to moment we are waiting for relief, to stave off the death of the Nation. Be quick, never mind how; send us money, we have no means of communication! ”

“ War, be it civil or foreign, never leaves men the same as it found them, though the common assumption that it makes them either stronger, or wiser in the exercise of their strength, is as false as it is dangerous. If war, apart from the pure aim and high spirit in and for which it conceivably may be, but seldom has been, undertaken, ennobles the soul as well as toughens the fibre of a nation, what virtues ought it not to have bred in these South American countries, where the lance was always glittering and the gun-shot always echoing? ”

“ It seems a truism to say that one who writes history ought to care for all that bears upon man in the present in order that he may comprehend what bore upon him in the past. This roaring loom of Time, these complex physical and moral forces playing round us, and driving us hither and thither by such a strange and intricate interlacement of movements that we seem to perceive no more than what is next us, and are unable to say whither we are tending, ought to be always before the historian’s mind. ”

“ The country we were traversing beneath the mountains was full of beauty, so graceful were the slopes and rolls of the hills, so bright the green of the pastures; while the sky, this being the rainy season, had a soft tone like that of England, and was flecked with white clouds sailing across the blue. It was also a prosperous-looking country, for the rich soil supported many villages, and many natives, men as well as women, were to be seen at work in the fields as we rode by. ”

“ We have dwelt so long in the valley of death with the sick, the starving, the dying, with the unending procession of little bodies sewn up in a piece of cloth, friendless corpses carried out on ladders, with gaping mouths and staring eyes, crude unpainted coffins, coffins covered with black chintz, the never-ceasing wail, and eyes of the mourners that are never dried, hands outstretched for what we cannot give, and now so many of our own number are down. ”

“ He was so much the most interesting human being in the House of Commons that, when he withdrew, many members said that the place had lost half its attraction for them, and that the chamber seemed empty because he was not in it. Plenty of able men remained. But even the ablest seemed ordinary, perhaps even commonplace, when compared with the figure that had vanished, a figure in whom were combined, as in no other man of his time, an unrivaled experience, an extraordinary activity and versatility of intellect, a fervid imagination, and an indomitable will. ”

“ The bay of Megillones, guarded by a lofty promontory on the south, and commanding a view of ridge after ridge of mountains stretching out to the north, has a beautiful sweep, and is enlivened by the abundance of seals and sea-lions, who wallow and bark to one another in the long, slow rollers of the Pacific. The beach is excellent for bathing, but the water so cold that only in the hotter part of the year do the Englishmen, who manage the railway and its machine works and who retain here the national love of salt water, find it suitable for anything more than a plunge in and out again. ”

“ He was, I think, the first man of Scottish birth who ever rose to be Primate of England, and he had the cautious self-restraint which is deemed characteristic of his nation. He knew how to be dignified without assumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without timidity, judicious without coldness. He was, above all things, a singularly just man, who recognised every one’s rights, and did not seek to overbear them by an exercise of authority. He was as ready to listen to his opponents as to his friends. ”

“ It is a landscape unlike anything one can see in Europe, and though the light in sea and sky is brilliant, the brilliance is on this coast soft and mellow, unlike the clear sharp radiance of the arid interior.
No one who cares for natural scenery quits Cape Town without ascending Table Mountain, whose summit affords not only a very beautiful and extensive prospect over the surrounding country, but a striking ocean view. ”

“ There is a certain beauty in a vast plain, but this one is so absolutely dead a level that you cannot see its vastness. There would be a charming variety of colour in it, the vivid green of the alfalfa and the light blue profusion of the flax blossoms contrasting with the yellowing wheat and the more sober greyish tints of the maize and the bleached pasture, but all these, as well as the shadows of the passing clouds, are not visible when one is standing on the ground and can see no further than a mile or two. ”

“ Imagine a man of strong will and brilliant intellectual powers, belonging to an ancient and persecuted race, who finds himself born in a foreign country, amid a people for whose ideas and habits he has no sympathy and scant respect. Suppose him proud, ambitious, self-confident—too ambitious to rest content in a private station, so self-confident as to believe that he can win whatever he aspires to. To achieve success, he must bend his pride, must use the language and humour the prejudices of those he has to deal with ”

“ To get the thrills of such a ride in their brimming fulness one must take it in the pale moonlight, passing into and out of the shadow of black crags as one spins along the ringing lines of steel.
As it is here that I bid farewell to the Andes, this is a fitting place for some observations on their scenery, as compared with that of the mountain systems more familiar to most of us, such as the Alps and the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, in the Old World; the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada in the New. ”

“ He never becomes a demagogue; he never stoops to beguile the multitude by appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through life a certain amplitude of view, a due sense of the dignity of his position, a due regard for the traditions of the ancient assembly which he leads, and when at last the destinies of England fall into his hands, he feels the grandeur of the charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to be her imperial place in the world. Whatever judgment history may ultimately pass upon him, she will find in the long annals of the English Parliament no more striking figure. ”

“ Feeling sure that the present problems will take some time to solve, I have sought to write what those who desire to understand the country may find useful even after the next few years have passed. And, so far from wishing to champion any view or to throw any fresh logs on the fire of controversy that has been blazing for the last few years, I am convinced that the thing now most needed in the interests of South Africa is to let controversies die out, to endeavour to forget the causes of irritation, and to look at the actual facts of the case in a purely practical spirit. ”