Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 2

Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride

And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to naught.

And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to naught.

Take up the White Man's burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.

Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise

To wait in heavy harness,
Upon your rich and grand;
The common working peoples,
The serfs of every land.

By pious cant and humbug
You’ll show his pathway plain,
To work for another’s profit
And suffer on in pain.

The England I was looking at was laid out on a map gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel: it lay on a bed of sky blue—the background of the map—its yellow form mysterious, because though it looked like a leg of mutton, it could not really look like anything so familiar as a leg of mutton because it was England—with shadings of pink and green, unlike any shadings of pink and green I had seen before, squiggly veins of red running in every direction.

The shoes I wore were made in England; so were my socks and cotton undergarments and the satin ribbons I wore tied at the end of two plaits of my hair.

No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress.

I did not know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.

With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.

The Burmese subinspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen.

And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East.