ng-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service.
These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or
broken in health and hope, in order that the land may be protected from
death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable
of standing alone. It will never stand alone; but the idea is a pretty
one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing
and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes
forward. If an advance be made, all credit is given to the native,
while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure
occurs, the Englishmen step forward and accept the blame."

This passage declares the heroic spirit of Mr Kipling's Anglo-Indian
tales; and many readers will fail to understand how exactly this spirit
has been found vainglorious.

There is a passage in Shakespeare where a king's envoy comes to claim
of a high-mettled and sweating warrior the fruits of victory. The
warrior grudges less surrendering the fruits of victory to the king
than he grudges surrendering his anger at being easily and prettily
addressed on the field of battle by a polite and dainty fellow who has
no idea how dearly the fruits of victory are purchased. Mr Kipling's
heroes are frail enough to feel some of this very natural indignation
when unbreathed politicians lecture them in the heat of their Indian
day. They come into touch with things simple and bitter. India has
searched out the value of many a Western shibboleth, destroyed many
doctrines, principles, ideas and theories. Phrases which look well in
a peroration look foolish when there is immediate work to be done, and
expediency begins to rule. The first lesson which the Indian civilian
learns, a lesson which is rarely omitted from any of Mr Kipling's
Indian stories, is that practical men are better for being ready to
take the world as they find it. The men who worship the Great God
Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, most terrible, One-eyed,
Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk--men who are set on saving their own
particular business--have no time for saving faces and phrases. They
have small respect for a principle. They have seen too many principles
break down under the particular instance. Hence there is in all Mr
Kipling's work a disrespect of things which are printed and made much
of in the contemporary British press; and this, again, has encouraged
the idea that