The nineteenth century, so far as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned, was remarkable for two great developments:  the mastery of matter and the expansion of the race.  Three great forces operated in it:  nationalism, commercialism, democracy—­the marshalling of the races, the merciless, remorseless laissez faire of the dominant bourgeoisie, and the practical, actual working government of men within a very limited equality.  The democracy of the nineteenth century is not the democracy of which the eighteenth century dreamed.  It is not the democracy of the Declaration, but it is what we have practised and lived that reconciles it to the fact of the “lesser breeds without the Law.”

It is of these developments and forces of the nineteenth century that Kipling has sung.  And the romance of it he has sung, that which underlies and transcends objective endeavour, which deals with race impulses, race deeds, and race traditions.  Even into the steam-laden speech of his locomotives has he breathed our life, our spirit, our significance.  As he is our mouthpiece, so are they his mouthpieces.  And the romance of the nineteenth-century man as he has thus expressed himself in the nineteenth century, in shaft and wheel, in steel and steam, in far journeying and adventuring, Kipling has caught up in wondrous songs for the future centuries to sing.

If the nineteenth century is the century of the Hooligan, then is Kipling the voice of the Hooligan as surely as he is the voice of the nineteenth century.  Who is more representative?  Is David Harum more representative of the nineteenth century?  Is Mary Johnston, Charles Major, or Winston Churchill?  Is Bret Harte?  William Dean Howells?  Gilbert Parker?  Who of them all is as essentially representative of nineteenth-century life?  When Kipling is forgotten, will Robert Louis Stevenson be remembered for his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his Kidnapped and his David Balfour?  Not so.  His Treasure Island will be a classic, to go down with Robinson Crusoe, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Jungle Books.  He will be remembered for his essays, for his letters, for his philosophy of life, for himself.  He will be the well beloved, as he has been the well beloved.  But his will be another claim upon posterity than what we are considering.  For each epoch has its singer.  As Scott sang the swan song of chivalry and Dickens the burgher-fear of the rising merchant class, so Kipling, as no one else, has sung the hymn of the dominant bourgeoisie, the war march of the white man round the world, the triumphant paean of commercialism and imperialism.  For that will he be remembered.

Oakland, California. 
October 1901.

THE OTHER ANIMALS