Document – Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden” (1901)

Abstract and Keywords

The phrase “the white man’s burden” and its association with the British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is well known today, but few realize that this exhortation was addressed to the American people, who had taken possession of the Philippines in 1899 as a result of the Spanish-American War (1898). Ignoring the independent Philippine government when signing a peace treaty with Spain, the US occupied Manila and within a year defeated the troops of the protesting Filipino government under the elected president Emilio Aguinaldo. US troops captured Aguinaldo in 1901, but a full-scale guerilla war continued—and tactics like the “waterboarding” of captured insurgents were introduced—until 1913. Kipling, however, consistently advocated the position that, as he claimed for the British in India, “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.asp

Document

  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • Send forth the best ye breed—
  • Go bind your sons to exile
  • To serve your captives’ need;
  • To wait in heavy harness,
  • On fluttered folk and wild—
  • Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
  • Half-devil and half-child.
  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • In patience to abide,
  • To veil the threat of terror
  • And check the show of pride;
  • By open speech and simple,
  • An hundred times made plain
  • To seek another’s profit,
  • And work another’s gain.
  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • The savage wars of peace—
  • Fill full the mouth of Famine
  • And bid the sickness cease;
  • And when your goal is nearest
  • The end for others sought,
  • Watch sloth and heathen Folly
  • Bring all your hopes to nought.
  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • No tawdry rule of kings,
  • But toil of serf and sweeper—
  • The tale of common things.
  • The ports ye shall not enter,
  • The roads ye shall not tread,
  • Go mark them with your living,
  • And mark them with your dead.
  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • And reap his old reward:
  • The blame of those ye better,
  • The hate of those ye guard—
  • The cry of hosts ye humour
  • (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
  • “Why brought he us from bondage,
  • Our loved Egyptian night?”
  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • Ye dare not stoop to less—
  • Nor call too loud on Freedom
  • To cloke your weariness;
  • By all ye cry or whisper,
  • By all ye leave or do,
  • The silent, sullen peoples
  • Shall weigh your gods and you.
  • Take up the White Man’s burden—
  • Have done with childish days—
  • The lightly proferred laurel,
  • The easy, ungrudged praise.
  • Comes now, to search your manhood
  • Through all the thankless years
  • Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
  • The judgment of your peers!

Review

  1. 1. Why, in Kipling’s estimation, should the Americans expect to encounter “sullen” reactions among the Filipinos if they go out of their way to provide “aid”?

  2. 2. Why does Kipling consider the “civilizing” of Filipinos to be a burden and a duty, and not merely an opportunity to exploit the native people?

Back to top