KIPLING ON AMERICA.

Evening Star, Issue 11683, 15 February 1902, Page 3

KIPLING ON AMERICA.

At twenty-three Mr Kipling found himself with a year in which he had nothing todo, and he resolved to go to America, It was at San Francisco, if one is not, mistaken, that Kipling became a total abstainer, and it was iu an American city, not it. Manchester*, that the sight of two drunken giria led reeling out of a concert ball by two young men impressed him. “ I became a Prohibitionist,” he wrote in a remarkable passage. “ Better it is that a man should go without his beer in public places, and content himself with swearing at the nar-row-mindedness of the majority, Ilian to bring temptation to the lips of young fools such as the four I have seen. I understand now why the preachers rave against drink. I have said: ‘ There is no barm in it, taken moderately,’ and yet my own demands for beer helped directly to semi these two girls reeling down the dark street to God above knows what end. If liquor is worth drinking, it is worth tailing a little trouble .o come at, such trouble as a mau will undergo to compass bis own desires. It is not good that we should let it lie before (he eyes of children, and I have been a fool in writing to the contrary.” That seems to be the true story of bow Mr Kipling- became a teetotaller.

Kipling’s earliest impression of popular government was formal during this visitto America, and his American journalism reads strangely to-day. “ Every American of twenty-one years of age possesses a vote,” he wrote. “He may not know how to run his own business, control bis wife, or instil reverence into his children: may be a pauper, half-crazed with drink, bankrupt, dissolute, or merely a born fool; but ire has a vote. If he likes he can be voting most of the time—voting for his State Governor, his municipal officers, local option, sewerage contracts, or anything else of which he has no special knowledge. Once every four years he votes for a new President. In lus spare moments lie votes for his own Judges—the men who shall give him justice. Such a position is manifestly best calculated to create an independent and unprejudiced administration. ” In those days, long before the Old World began buying up the New. Kipling foresaw the boom that has at last arrived. “ I

love this people,” he wrote. ”1 admit everything. Their Government’s provisional, their law’s the notion of the moment, their railways are made of hairpins and match sticks, and most of their good luck lives in their woods and mines and rivers, and not in their brains but for all that, they bo the biggest, finest, and best people on the surface of the globe! Wait till the Anglo-American-German dew - the man of the future—is properly equipped. There is nothing known to man that lie will not be, and his country will sway the world with one foot, as a man tilts a sce-saw plank. Y'ou wait and see. Sixty million people, chiefly of English instincts, who are trained from youth to believe that nothing is hitpossible, don’t slink through the centuries like Russian peasantry. They are bound to leave their mark somewhere, and don’t you forget it.” Among these people Kipling looked on the Western world for the first time with observant eyes; it was in the land of big things that his big ideas were born.