Laboriously achieved but only precariously defended

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Rudyard Kipling was “representative of a cast of mind which later generations came to deplore,” John Derbyshire notes, but his “larger political views need to be seen in the context of the great social disturbances that roiled his country in the years before World War One”:

Female suffrage: Irish republican agitation: the rising power of labor unions and the first stirrings of the welfare state: none of it made sense to Kipling and he expressed his feelings in public speeches, and in poems like “The City of Brass”:
They said: “Who has hate in his soul? Who has envied his neighbour? / Let him arise and control both that man and his labour.”
They said: “Who is eaten by sloth? Whose unthrift has destroyed him? / He shall levy a tribute from all because none have employed him.”

Evelyn Waugh said it exactly: “[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.”

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