Sloth. Folly. Terrorism. All these would make foreign interventions to help alien peoples fail as frequently as they succeeded. The good results left behind would be marked mainly by the graves of your dead. The locals would be taught to hate your legacy, and your lily-livered allies would cast blame. Lesser nations would take up simple tasks that won acclaim for achieving nothing — “the lightly proffered laurel, and easy ungrudged praise.” But a great people could never “call too loud on freedom.” Let time pass, and they would be judged well by the wise.

Rudyard Kipling’s urging of “The White Man’s Burden” on the newly imperial United States in 1899 has been scorned by isolationists on the Left and Right ever since. Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie had little in common except their revulsion for the imperial task set out by Kipling. His empirically accurate observation that foreign interventions to advance liberal governance, what he called “sane and orderly administration,” were an exclusive preserve of European cultures has been assailed as racist, a misunderstanding of his deeper meaning of the word “white,” which for him implied good-willed and strong (Gunga Din was “white, clear white”). Published simultaneously in the London Times and McClure’s Magazine, the poem was greeted mainly with parodies from American readers.