Page:Revolution and Other Essays.djvu/243

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revenues, and conquering by virtue of his sheer pluck and enterprise and superior machinery.

Now the future centuries, seeking to find out what the nineteenth- century Anglo-Saxon was and what were his works, will have small concern with what he did not do and what he would have liked to do. These things he did do, and for these things will he be remembered. His claim on posterity will be that in the nineteenth century he mastered matter; his twentieth-century claim will be, in the highest probability, that he organized life — but that will be sung by the twentieth-century Kiplings or the twenty-first-century Kiplings. Rudyard Kipling of the nineteenth century has sung of "things as they are." He has seen life as it is, "taken it up squarely," in both his hands, and looked upon it. What better preachment upon the Anglo-Saxon and what he has done can be had than "The Bridge Builders"? what better appraisement than "The White Man's Burden"? As for faith and clean ideals, — not of "children and gods, but men in a world of men," — who has preached them better than he?

Primarily, Kipling has stood for the doer as