HS 112 DE (S1 16) Essay 3.5Directions This assignment is for a .docx

HS 112 DE (S1 16) Essay 3.5
Directions: This assignment is for a formal paper, meaning that
you should present a complete argument using clean, controlled
prose in standard English. The formal requirements are the
following:
· Your essay directly answers the prompt (alternately, if you
choose to write against the grain, you must explain why you are
doing so)
· Your essay will use evidence to explain reasons that
substantiate your claim (which should be a historical
interpretation in answer to the prompt)
· Sources will be cited using a recognized citation system
(MLA, APA are acceptable, Chicago is preferred). Information
about proper citation can be found in the writer’s guide from
EN 101/2 or at the Purdue Online Writing Lab (search Purdue
OWL).
· The paper should be 500-700 words in length with minimal
grammar, spelling, syntax, or other language errors.
· Papers are due as uploaded Word files .
· Context: This week’s topics (political ideologies, growth of
empires, modern society) share a common element – a sense
that some people are superior to others. The groups could be
defined by nationality, sex/gender, economic class,
race/ethnicity, or some other factor, and some argued against
these ideas of superiority while others created new systems and
tried to fit even more people into their schema. One key
paradox of the modern world is how ideas of democracy,
equality, and inclusion coexisted with ideas of superiority,
imperial overlordship, and race/class/gender difference. For
this paper, you will adopt the persona of someone who is deeply
involved in at least one of these controversies (e.g. social class,
gender, empire, tradition v. modernity, etc.). One conceit of the
assignment is that your person must be well-read, no taking on
of uninformed points of view is allowed. For this paper, you

may use any or all of the primary sources assigned to date (i.e.
you can revisit material from earlier modules). Additional
primary sources addressing the issue of imperialism have been
added to the list.
Prompt: Taking on the persona of someone who is well-
informed and believes passionately in your opinions, argue for
or against a major decision to be made by your home country’s
government in the period from 1850-1914 (you will have to
identify your country and the decision – be sure it’s a real one
that is introduced in the textbook). The decision should be
involved with one of the aspects of superiority/inferiority
discussed in the primary sources as well as this modules’
textbook chapters.
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1877:
Cecil Rhodes,
"Confession of Faith"
Rhodes originally wrote this on June 2, 1877, in Oxford. Later,
that year in Kimberley, he made some additions and changes.
What follows is that amended statement. The spelling and
grammar errors were in the original.
It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to
one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another

great wealth, and as each seizes on his idea, for that he more or
less works for the rest of his existence. To myself thinking over
the same question the wish came to render myself useful to my
country. I then asked myself how could I and after reviewing
the various methods I have felt that at the present day we are
actually limiting our children and perhaps bringing into the
world half the human beings we might owing to the lack of
country for them to inhabit that if we had retained America
there would at this moment be millions more of English living. I
contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the
more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.
Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most
despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there
would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence,
look again at the extra employment a new country added to our
dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory
means in the future birth to some more of the English race who
otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to this
the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule
simply means the end of all wars, at this moment had we not
lost America I believe we could have stopped the Russian-
Turkish war by merely refusing money and supplies. Having
these ideas what scheme could we think of to forward this
object. I look into history and I read the story of the Jesuits I
see what they were able to do in a bad cause and I might say
under bad leaders.
At the present day I become a member of the Masonic order I
see the wealth and power they possess the influence they hold
and I think over their ceremonies and I wonder that a large body
of men can devote themselves to what at times appear the most
ridiculous and absurd rites without an object and without an
end.
The idea gleaming and dancing before ones eyes like a will-of-
the-wisp at last frames itself into a plan. Why should we not

form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the
British Empire and the bringing
of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the
recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon
race but one Empire. What a dream, but yet it is probable, it is
possible. I once heard it argued by a fellow in my own college, I
am sorry to own it by an Englishman, that it was good thing for
us that we have lost the United States. There are some subjects
on which there can be no arguments, and to an Englishman this
is one of them, but even from an American’s point of view just
picture what they have lost, look at their government, are not
the frauds that yearly come before the public view a disgrace to
any country and especially their’s which is the finest in the
world. Would they have occurred had they remained under
English rule great as they have become how infinitely greater
they would have been with the softening and elevating
influences of English rule, think of those countless 000’s of
Englishmen that during the last 100 years would have crossed
the Atlantic and settled and populated the United States. Would
they have not made without any prejudice a finer country of it
than the low class Irish and German emigrants? All this we have
lost and that country loses owing to whom? Owing to two or
three ignorant pig-headed statesmen of the last century, at their
door lies the blame. Do you ever feel mad? do you ever feel
murderous. I think I do with those men. I bring facts to prove
my assertion. Does an English father when his sons wish to
emigrate ever think of suggesting emigration to a country under
another flag, never—it would seem a disgrace to suggest such a
thing I think that we all think that poverty is better under our
own flag than wealth under a foreign one.
Put your mind into another train of thought. Fancy Australia
discovered and colonised under the French flag, what would it
mean merely several millions of English unborn that at present
exist we learn from the past and to form our future. We learn
from having lost to cling to what we possess. We know the size

of the world we know the total extent. Africa is still lying ready
for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every
opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this
one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply
means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most
human, most honourable race the world possesses.
To forward such a scheme what a splendid help a secret society
would be a society not openly acknowledged but who would
work in secret for such an object.
I contend that there are at the present moment numbers of the
ablest men in the world who would devote their whole lives to
it. I often think what a loss to the English nation in some
respects the abolition of the Rotten Borough System has been.
What thought strikes a man entering the house of commons, the
assembly that rule the whole world? I think it is the mediocrity
of the men but what is the cause. It is simply—an assembly of
wealth of men whose lives have been spent in the accumulation
of money and whose time has been too much engaged to be able
to spare any for the study of past history. And yet in hands of
such men rest our destinies. Do men like the great Pitt, and
Burke and Sheridan not now to exist. I contend they do. There
are men now living with I know no other term the [Greek term]
of Aristotle but there are not ways for enabling them to serve
their Country. They live and die unused unemployed. What has
the main cause of the success of the Romish Church? The fact
that every enthusiast, call it if you like every madman finds
employment in it. Let us form the same kind of society a Church
for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should
have members in every part of the British Empire working with
one object and one idea we should have its members placed at
our universities and our schools and should watch the English
youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every
thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object,
he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he

is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty
details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound
by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his County. He should
then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to
that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.
Take another case, let us fancy a man who finds himself his own
master with ample means of attaining his majority whether he
puts the question directly to himself or not, still like the old
story of virtue and vice in the Memorabilia a fight goes on in
him as to what he should do. Take if he plunges into dissipation
there is nothing too reckless he does not attempt but after a time
his life palls on him, he mentally says this is not good enough,
he changes his life, he reforms, he travels, he thinks now I have
found the chief good in life, the novelty wears off, and he tires,
to change again, he goes into the far interior after the wild game
he thinks at last I’ve found that in life of which I cannot tire,
again he is disappointed. He returns he thinks is there nothing I
can do in life? Here I am with means, with a good house, with
everything that is to be envied and yet I am not happy I am tired
of life he possesses within him a portion of the [Greek term] of
Aristotle but he knows it not, to such a man the Society should
go, should test, and should finally show him the greatness of the
scheme and list him as a member.
Take one more case of the younger son with high thoughts, high
aspirations, endowed by nature with all the faculties to make a
great man, and with the sole wish in life to serve his Country
but he lacks two things the means and the opportunity, ever
troubled by a sort of inward deity urging him on to high and
noble deeds, he is compelled to pass his time in some
occupation which furnishes him with mere existence, he lives
unhappily and dies miserably. Such men as these the Society
should search out and use for the furtherance of their object.
(In every Colonial legislature the Society should attempt to

have its members prepared at all times to vote or speak and
advocate the closer union of England and the colonies, to crush
all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our
Empire. The Society should inspire and even own portions of
the press for the press rules the mind of the people. The Society
should always be searching for members who might by their
position in the world by their energies or character forward the
object but the ballot and test for admittance should be severe)
Once make it common and it fails. Take a man of great wealth
who is bereft of his children perhaps having his mind soured by
some bitter disappointment who shuts himself up separate from
his neighbours and makes up his mind to a miserable existence.
To such men as these the society should go gradually disclose
the greatness of their scheme and entreat him to throw in his
life and property with them for this object. I think that there are
thousands now existing who would eagerly grasp at the
opportunity. Such are the heads of my scheme.
For fear that death might cut me off before the time for
attempting its development I leave all my worldly goods in trust
to S. G. Shippard and the Secretary for the Colonies at the time
of my death to try to form such a Society with such an object.
from: http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Rhodes-Confession.htm
“The White Man’s Burden”: Kipling’s Hymn to U.S.
Imperialism
In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling
wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United

States and The Philippine Islands.” In this poem, Kipling urged
the U.S. to take up the “burden” of empire, as had Britain and
other European nations. Published in the February, 1899 issue
of McClure’s Magazine, the poem coincided with the beginning
of the Philippine-American War and U.S. Senate ratification of
the treaty that placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the
Philippines under American control. Theodore Roosevelt, soon
to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem
and sent it to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
commenting that it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense
from the expansion point of view.” Not everyone was as
favorably impressed as Roosevelt. The racialized notion of the
“White Man’s burden” became a euphemism for imperialism,
and many anti-imperialists couched their opposition in reaction
to the phrase.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
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;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Source: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The
United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899.” Rudyard
Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1929).
From: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/
Edward D. Morel, The Black Man’s Burden (1903)
Edward Morel (1873-1924) was a French-born British journalist
and socialist who drew
attention to imperial abuses and led a campaign against slavery
in the Belgian Congo. While
working for a Liverpool shipping firm in Brussels, Morel
noticed that the ships leaving Belgium
for the Congo carried only guns, chains, and ammunition, but no
commercial goods, and that
ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable
products such as rubber and ivory,
which led him to surmise that Belgian King Leopold II's colony

was exploitative and relied on
slave labor. Morel wrote The Black Man’s Burden (1920), from
which the following excerpt is
taken, as a response to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White
Man’s Burden.”
It is [the Africans] who carry the “Black man’s burden.” They
have not withered away before the
white man’s occupation. Indeed… Africa has ultimately
absorbed within itself every Caucasian...
In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white
man has massacred the African in
heaps. The African has survived, and it is well for the white
settlers that he has.
In the process of imposing his political dominion over the
African, the white man has
carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Africa to the
other. The African has resisted,
and persisted.
For three centuries the white man seized and enslaved millions
of Africans and
transported them, with every circumstance of ferocious cruelty,
across the seas. Still the African
survived and, in his land of exile, multiplied exceedingly.
But what the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has
failed to do; what the
mapping out of European political “spheres of influence” has
failed to do; what the Maxim
[machine gun] and the rifle, the slave gang, labor in the bowels
of the earth and the lash, have
failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have
failed to do; what even the
oversea slave trade failed to do, the power of modern
capitalistic exploitation, assisted by
modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in
accomplishing.

For from the evils of the latter, scientifically applied and
enforced, there is no escape for
the African. Its destructive effects are not spasmodic: they are
permanent. In its permanence
resides its fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but
the soul. It breaks the spirit. It
attacks the African at every turn, from every point of vantage. It
wrecks his polity, uproots him
from the land, invades his family life, destroys his natural
pursuits and occupations, claims his
whole time, enslaves him in his own home…
In Africa, especially in tropical Africa, which a capitalistic
imperialism threatens and has,
in part, already devastated, man is incapable of reacting against
unnatural conditions. In those
regions man is engaged in a perpetual struggle against disease
and an exhausting climate, which
tells heavily upon child-bearing; and there is no scientific
machinery for salving the weaker
members of the community. The African of the tropics is
capable of tremendous physical labors.
But he cannot accommodate himself to the European system of
monotonous, uninterrupted labor,
with its long and regular hours, involving, moreover, as it
frequently does, severance from
natural surroundings and nostalgia, the condition of melancholy
resulting from separation from
home, a malady to which the African is especially prone.
Climatic conditions forbid it. When the
system is forced upon him, the tropical African droops and dies.
Nor is violent physical opposition to abuse and injustice
henceforth possible for the
African in any part of Africa. His chances of effective
resistance have been steadily dwindling
with the increasing perfectibility in the killing power of modern
armament…

Thus the African is really helpless against the material gods of
the white man, as
embodied in the trinity of imperialism, capitalistic-exploitation,
and militarism. If the white man
retains these gods and if he insists upon making the African
worship them as assiduously as he
has done himself, the African will go the way of the…
Amerindian, …the aboriginal Australian,
and many more. And this would be at once a crime of enormous
magnitude, and a world
disaster…
To reduce all the varied and picturesque and stimulating
episodes in savage life to a dull
routine of endless toil for uncomprehended ends, to dislocate
social ties and disrupt social
institutions; to stifle nascent desires and crush mental
development; to graft upon primate
passions the annihilating evils of scientific slavery, and the
bestial imaginings of civilized man,
unrestrained by convention or law; …to kill the soul in a people
– this is a crime which
transcends physical murder…
It is often argued that the agricultural… methods of the African
are capable of
improvement. The statement is undoubtedly true. It applies with
equal force to the land of
Britain…Why, it is only since the beginning of the 18th century
that the rotation of crops has
been practiced in England! But the Kano farmers in Northern
Nigeria have understood rotation
of crops and grass manuring for at least five hundred years. To
advance such truisms as an
excuse for robbing the native communities of their land,

degrading farmers in their own right to
the level of hired laborers urged on by the lash, and conferring
monopolistic rights over the land
and its fruits to private corporations, is to make truth the
stalking horse of oppression and
injustice. The statement of fact may be accurate. The claim put
forward on the strength of it is
purely predatory.
Those who urge this and kindred arguments only do so to assist
the realization of their
purpose. That purpose is clear. It is to make of Africans all over
Africa a servile race; to exploit
African labor, and through African labor, the soil of Africa for
their own exclusive benefit…
For a time it may be possible for the white man to maintain a
white civilization in the
colonizable, or partly colonizable, areas of the African
Continent based on servile or semi-servile
labor: to build up a servile State. But even there the attempt can
be no more than fleeting. The
days of Roman imperialism are done with forever. Education
sooner or later breaks all chains,
and knowledge cannot be kept from the African… [When] he
becomes alive to his power the
whole fabric of European domination will fall to pieces in
shame and ruin. From these failures
the people of Europe will suffer moral and material damage of a
far-reaching kind…
Why cannot the white imperial peoples, acknowledging in some
measure the injuries they
have inflicted upon the African, turn a new leaf in their
treatment of him? For nearly two
thousand years they have professed to be governed by the
teachings of Christ. Can they not begin
in the closing century of that era, to practice what they profess
– and what their missionaries of

religion teach the African? Can they not cease to regard the
African as a producer of dividends
for a selected few among their number, and begin to regard him
as a human being with human
rights? Have they made such a success of their own civilization
that they can contemplate with
equanimity the forcing of all its social failures upon Africa – its
hideous and devastating
inequalities, its pauperisms, its senseless and destructive
egoisms, its vulgar and soulless
materialism? It is in their power to work such good to Africa –
and such incalculable harm! Can
they not make up their minds that their strength shall be used
for noble ends? Africa demands at
their hands, justice, and understanding sympathy-not ill-
informed sentiment. And when these are
dealt out to her she repays a thousandfold…

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