From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

"I will answer you, although I believe you are not serious. At present Mr. Kipling's mind, in search of a philosophy, plays with the contemplation of a world reduced to law and order; the law and order being such as universal British rule would impose. There might be many worse worlds than a world so ruled, and in verse the prospect can be made to look fair enough:—"

"'Keep ye the Law—be swift in all obedience—
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!'

"Clean and wholesome teaching it seems, persuading civilised men that, as they are strong, so the obligation rests on them to set the world in order, carry tillage into its wildernesses, and clean up its bloodstained corners. Yet as a political philosophy it lacks the first of all essentials, and as Mr. Kipling develops it we begin to detect the flaw in the system:—

"'The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is his own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,
An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less.
Etc.'

"What is wrong with this? Why, simply that it leaves Justice altogether out of account. The system has no room for it; even as it has no room for clemency, mansuetude; forbearance towards the weak. My next-door neighbour may keep his children in rags and his house in dirt, may be a loose liver with a frantically foolish religious creed; but all this does not justify me in taking possession of his house, and either poking him out or making him a serf on his own hearthstone. If there be such a thing as universal justice, then all men have their rights under it—even verminous persons. We are obliged to put constraint upon them when their habits afflict us beyond a certain point. And civilised nations are obliged to put constraint upon uncivilised ones which shock their moral sense beyond a certain point—as by cannibalism or human sacrifice. But such interference should stand upon a nice sense of the offender's rights, and in practice does so stand. The custom of polygamy, for instance (as practised abroad), horribly offends quite a large majority of His Majesty's lieges; yet Great Britain tolerates polygamy even in her own subject races. Neither polygamy nor uncleanliness can be held any just excuse for turning a nation out of its possessions.

"And another reason for insisting upon the strictest reading of justice in these dealings between nations is the temptation which the least laxity offers to the stronger—a temptation which Press and Pulpit made no pretence of resisting during the late war. 'We are better than they,' was the cry; 'we are cleanlier, less ignorant; we have arts and a literature, whereas they have none; we make for progress and enlightenment, while they are absurdly conservative, if not retrogressive. Therefore the world will be the better by our annexing their land, and substituting our government for theirs. Therefore our cause, too, is the juster.' But therefore it is nothing of the sort. A dirty man may be in the right, and a clean man in the wrong; an ungodly man in the right, and a godly man in the wrong; and the most specious and well-intentioned system which allows justice to be confused with something else will allow it to be stretched, even by well-meaning persons, to cover theft, lying and flat piracy.

"Are you trying to prove," demanded X, "that Mr. Kipling is a feminine poet?"

"No, but I am about to bring you to the conclusion that in his worse mood he is a sham-masculine one. The 'Recessional' proves that, man of genius that he is, he rises to a conception of Universal Law. But too often he is trying to dodge it with sham law. A woman would not appeal to law at all: she would boldly take her stand on lawlessness. He, being an undoubted but misguided man, has to find some other way out; so he takes a twopenny-halfpenny code as the mood seizes him—be it the code of a barrack or of a Johannesburg Jew—and hymns it lustily against the universal code: and the pity and the sin of it is that now and then by flashes—as in 'The Tale of Purun Bhagat'—he sees the truth.