The most important source of Mr. Bryce’s knowledge, the one which has furnished the material for nearly all his books, has been his first-hand observation and study of many countries. When still a young man he wandered alone over Mount Ararat, since the native guides refused to follow him to the unknown wilds of that lonely peak. He visited the Ottoman Empire in 1876, and, as a result of his investigations there, became an advocate of the Bulgarian cause; in fact it was his speeches on the Eastern Question which first made him prominent politically. Mr. Bryce has traveled also in Iceland; he was in Africa just previous to the Boer War; he has been all over South America; and he knows the United States as few Americans know it. He has studied these countries with great faithfulness, observing keenly every phase of the political and social life. An interesting sample of his method of gathering information is found in the chapter on “The Position of Women” in _The American Commonwealth_. When traveling in the West he noticed that all of the women seemed so very well dressed that apparently none could be the wife or daughter of a workingman; but close observation dispelled this illusion. Idling in a bookstore one day in Oregon, he noticed a woman who was asking for a certain magazine. After her departure he asked the salesman who she was, and found that she was the wife of a workman, and the magazine a Paris fashion journal. “This,” says Mr. Bryce, “set me to observing female dress more closely, and it turned out to be perfectly true that the women in these little towns were following the Parisian fashions very closely, and were, in fact, ahead of the majority of English ladies belonging to the professional and mercantile classes.” Thus no detail, however trivial, escapes him; the pleasant and unpleasant phases of our American life, our manners, clothes, scenery have all been noted and reckoned with in the statement of tendencies and conclusions.