him, so that all may know his unreasonableness. He has "some care as
to the purity of his ways, does not wish for strange gods, nor juggle
with intellectual phantasmagoria." He loves freedom, but is dictatorial
to others, is self-willed, has boundless energy, and does things for
himself. He is also a master of matter, an organizer of law, and an
administrator of justice.

And in the nineteenth century he has lived up to his reputation. Being
the nineteenth century and no other century, and in so far different from
all other centuries, he has expressed himself differently. But blood
will tell, and in the name of God, the Bible, and Democracy, he has gone
out over the earth, possessing himself of broad lands and fat 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 opposed to the dreamer--the
doer, who lists not to idle songs of empty days, but who goes forth and
does things, with bended back and sweated brow and work-hardened hands.
The most characteristic thing about Kipling is his lover of actuality,
his intense practicality, his proper and necessary respect for the
hard-headed, hard-fisted fact. And, above all, he has preached the
gospel of work, and as potently as Carlyle ever preached. For he has
preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men,
to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet
stand agape