(1833; fuller edition, 1847). Some of his writings, among them the History of the Christian Church during the First Three Centuries and the lectures On the Right Use of the Early Fathers, were published posthumously.
A short memoir of him appeared in 1856 from the hand of William Selwyn, his successor in the divinity professorship.
BLUNT, WILFRID SCAWEN (1840–), English poet and publicist, was born on the 17th of August 1840 at Petworth House, Sussex, the son of Francis Scawen Blunt, who served in the Peninsular War and was wounded at Corunna. He was educated at Stonyhurst and Oscott, and entered the diplomatic service in 1858, serving successively at Athens, Madrid, Paris and Lisbon. In 1867 he was sent to South America, and on his return to England retired from the service on his marriage with Lady Anne Noel, daughter of the earl of Lovelace and a granddaughter of the poet Byron. In 1872 he succeeded, by the death of his elder brother, to the estate of Crabbet Park, Sussex, where he established a famous stud for the breeding of Arab horses. Mr and Lady Anne Blunt travelled repeatedly in northern Africa, Asia Minor and Arabia, two of their expeditions being described in Lady Anne’s Bedouins of the Euphrates (2 vols., 1879) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd (2 vols., 1881). Mr Blunt became known as an ardent sympathizer with Mahommedan aspirations, and in his Future of Islam (1888) he directed attention to the forces which afterwards produced the movements of Pan-Islamism and Mahdism. He was a violent opponent of the English policy in the Sudan, and in The Wind and the Whirlwind (in verse, 1883) prophesied its downfall. He supported the national party in Egypt, and took a prominent part in the defence of Arabi Pasha. Ideas about India (1885) was the result of two visits to that country, the second in 1883–1884. In 1885 and 1886 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Home Ruler; and in 1887 he was arrested in Ireland while presiding over a political meeting in connexion with the agitation on Lord Clanricarde’s estate, and was imprisoned for two months in Kilmainham. His best-known volume of verse, Love Sonnets of Proteus (1880), is a revelation of his real merits as an emotional poet. The Poetry of Wilfrid Blunt (1888), selected and edited by W. E. Henley and Mr George Wyndham, includes these sonnets, together with “Worth Forest, a Pastoral,” “Griselda” (described as a “society novel in rhymed verse”), translations from the Arabic, and poems which had appeared in other volumes.
BLUNTSCHLI, JOHANN KASPAR (1808–1881), Swiss jurist and politician, was born at Zürich on the 7th of March 1808, the son of a soap and candle manufacturer. From school he passed into the Politische Institut (a seminary of law and political science) in his native town, and proceeding thence to the universities of Berlin and Bonn, took the degree of doctor juris in the latter in 1829. Returning to Zürich in 1830, he threw himself with ardour into the political strife which was at the time unsettling all the cantons of the Confederation, and in this year published Über die Verfassung der Stadt Zürich (On the Constitution of the City of Zürich). This was followed by Das Volk und der Souverän (1830), a work in which, while pleading for constitutional government, he showed his bitter repugnance of the growing Swiss radicalism. Elected in 1837 a member of the Grosser Rath (Great Council), he became the champion of the moderate conservative party. Fascinated by the metaphysical views of the philosopher Friedrich Rohmer (1814–1856), a man who attracted little other attention, he endeavoured in Psychologische Studien über Staat und Kirche (1844) to apply them to political science generally, and in particular as a panacea for the constitutional troubles of Switzerland. Bluntschli, shortly before his death, remarked, “I have gained renown as a jurist, but my greatest desert is to have comprehended Rohmer.” This philosophical essay, however, coupled with his uncompromising attitude towards both radicalism and ultramontanism, brought him many enemies, and rendered his continuance in the council, of which he had been elected president, impossible. He resigned his seat, and on the overthrow of the Sonderbund in 1847, perceiving that all hope of power for his party was lost, took leave of Switzerland with the pamphlet Stimme eines Schweizers über die Bundesreform (1847), and settled at Munich, where he became professor of constitutional law in 1848.
At Munich he devoted himself with energy to the special work of his chair, and, resisting the temptation to identify himself with politics, published Allgemeines Staatsrecht (1851–1852); Lehre vom modernen Staat (1875–1876); and, in conjunction with Karl Ludwig Theodor Brater (1819–1869), Deutsches Staatswörterbuch (11 vols., 1857–1870; abridged by Edgar Loening in 3 vols., 1869–1875). Meanwhile he had assiduously worked at his code for the canton of Zürich, Privatrechtliches Gesetzbuch für den Kanton Zürich (4 vols., 1854–1856), a work which was much praised at the time, and which, particularly the section devoted to contracts, served as a model for codes both in Switzerland and other countries. In 1861 Bluntschli received a call to Heidelberg as professor of constitutional law (Staatsrecht), where he again entered the political arena, endeavouring in his Geschichte des allgemeinen Staatsrechts und der Politik (1864) “to stimulate,” as he said, “the political consciousness of the German people, to cleanse it of prejudices and to further it intellectually.” In his new home, Baden, he devoted his energies and political influence, during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, towards keeping the country neutral. From this time Bluntschli became active in the field of international law, and his fame as a jurist belongs rather to this province than to that of constitutional law. His Das moderne Kriegsrecht (1866); Das moderne Völkerrecht (1868), and Das Beuterecht im Krieg (1878) are likely to remain invaluable text-books in this branch of the science of jurisprudence. He also wrote a pamphlet on the “Alabama” case.
Bluntschli was one of the founders, at Ghent in 1873, of the Institute of International Law, and was the representative of the German emperor at the conference on the international laws of war at Brussels. During the latter years of his life he took a lively interest in the Protestantenverein, a society formed to combat reactionary and ultramontane views of theology. He died suddenly at Karlsruhe on the 21st of October 1881. His library was acquired by Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore, U.S.A.
Among his works, other than those before mentioned, may be cited Deutsches Privatrecht (1853–1854); Deutsche Staatslehre für Gebildete (1874); and Deutsche Staatslehre und die heutige Staatenwelt (1880).
For notices of Bluntschli’s life and works see his interesting autobiography, Denkwürdiges aus meinem Leben (1884); von Holtzendorff, Bluntschli und seine Verdienste um die Staatswissenschaften (1882); Brockhaus, Konversations-Lexicon (1901); and a biography by Meyer von Kronau, in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
BLYTH, a market town and seaport of Northumberland, England, in the parliamentary borough of Morpeth, 9 m. E.S.E. of that town, at the mouth of the river Blyth, on a branch of the North Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5472. This is the port for a considerable coal-mining district, and its harbour, on the south side of the river, is provided with mechanical appliances for shipping coal. There are five dry docks, and upwards of 112 m. of quayage. Timber is largely imported. Some shipbuilding and the manufacture of rope, sails and ship-fittings are carried on, and the fisheries are valuable. Blyth is also in considerable favour as a watering-place; there are a pleasant park, a pier, protecting the harbour, about 1 m. in length, and a sandy beach affording sea-bathing. The river Blyth rises near the village of Kirkheaton, and has an easterly course of about 25 m. through a deep, well-wooded and picturesque valley.
B’NAI B’RITH (or Sons of the Covenant), INDEPENDENT ORDER OF, a Jewish fraternal society. It was founded at New York in 1843 by a number of German Jews, headed by Henry Jones, and is the oldest as well as the largest of the Jewish fraternal organizations. Its membership in 1908 was 35,870, its 481 lodges and 10 grand lodges being distributed over the United States, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Rumania, Egypt and Palestine. Its objects are to promote a high morality among Jews, regardless of differences as to dogma and ceremonial customs, and especially to inculcate the supreme virtues of
