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 at Carlyle’s turgid utterance.  Do the thing to your hand, and do it with all your might.  Never mind what the thing is; so long as it is something.  Do it.  Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and soulless Tomlinson, who was denied at Heaven’s gate.

The blundering centuries have perseveringly pottered and groped through the dark; but it remained for Kipling’s century to roll in the sun, to formulate, in other words, the reign of law.  And of the artists in Kipling’s century, he of them all has driven the greater measure of law in the more consummate speech: 

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 what he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.

- And so it runs, from McAndrew’s Law, Order, Duty, and Restraint, to his last least line, whether of The Vampire or The Recessional.  And no prophet out of Israel has cried out more loudly the sins of the people, nor called them more awfully to repent.