Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1254 page)

Gentlemen, you are fortunate beyond most other communities. Your own labour, your own sacrifice have given you material prosperity in overwhelming abundance; and the Gods above have not denied you the light that shows the true use and the true significance of that material prosperity.

One is forced back to the old words that you stand on the threshold of an unbelievable future. There is no man, and here I must quote again, “that can foresee or set limits to your destiny”. But any man, gentlemen — even I — have the right to remind you, before I sit down, that to whom much has been given, from them much — much — shall be required!

The Handicaps of Letters

I AM
greatly honoured by being allowed to propose the toast of “Prosperity to the Royal Literary Fund” — in other words, to appeal to you on behalf of certain men and women of letters who stand in need of your assistance. And since one speaks of the workmen, one must speak also a little of the craft to which they have given or are giving their lives. I shall be specially careful to guard against making extravagant claims for either. If you go no further back than the Book of Job you will find that letters, like the art of printing, were born perfect. Some professions, law and medicine, for example, are still in a state of evolution, inasmuch as no expert in them seems to be quite sure that he can win a case or cure a cold. On the other hand, the calling of letters carries with it the disabilities from which these professions are free. When an eminent lawyer or physician is once dead, he is always dead. His ghost does not continue to practise in the Law Courts or the operating theatre. Now it cannot have escaped your attention that a writer often does not begin to live till he has been dead for some time. In certain notorious cases the longer he has been dead the more alive he is, and the more acute is his competition against the living. I do not ask you to imagine the feelings of a barrister exposed to the competition of all the dead Lord Chancellors that ever sat on the woolsack, each delivering judgements on any conceivable case at 6d. per judgement, paper-bound. I only ask you to allow that what lawyers call the “dead hand” — in this case with a pen in it — lies heavy on the calling of letters. In other callings of life there exists a convention that what a man has made shall be his own and his children’s after him. With regard to letters, the world decides that, after a very short time, all that a writer may have created shall be taken from him and shall become the property of anybody and everybody except the original maker. This may be right. It may be more important that men should be helped to think than that they should be helped to live. But those on whom this righteousness is executed find it difficult to establish a family on letters. Sometimes they find it difficult to feed one. That letters should be exempted from the law of continuous ownership seems to constitute another handicap to the calling. Most men are bound by oath, or organisation, or natural instinct not to work for nothing. When his demon urges a man of letters to work, he may do so without any regard to wages or the sentiments of his fellow-workers. This may be incontinence or inspiration. Whichever it is, we must face the fact and its consequences, that at any moment a man of letters may choose to pay, not only with his skin, but in cash and credit for leave to do his work, to say the thing he desires to say. This is perhaps not fair to himself or his fellows, but it is a law of his being, and as such constitutes yet another handicap.

And there is a legend in Philistia — a pharisaical legend — that those who follow letters are disorderly-minded, unstable of habit, and thus peculiarly open to misfortune. Now, since the Pharisees originate very little that has not been put into their minds by the Scribes, it is possible that men of letters, writing about men of letters, have themselves to thank in some measure for this unkind judgement. Every man in trouble naturally cries that there is no sorrow like his sorrow; but not all men, not all men’s friends, nor all men’s enemies, can draw the world’s attention to that complaint. Writers have been their own interpreters in this respect — not always to their own advantage. It does not square with experience that any class of men has pre-eminence over any other class in the zeal and perseverance with which its members go about to compass their own ruin. Is it not more reasonable to hold that the triple handicap I have mentioned, and not so much individual folly, is responsible for the high percentage of casualties among men of letters. Men perpetually measured against the great works of the past; men debarred by law from full possession of their own works in the present; men driven from within to work whether their world desires that work or not — such men must always enjoy the privilege accorded to minorities. They must suffer. Much of this suffering is inevitable, but some of it the Fund, by your good help, can reach and alleviate as few other institutions can. It has had over a century’s experience of all the chances and misfortunes that can overtake men and women. Its work is done, as we would desire it to be done in our own cases, in silence and discretion, and for that very reason it is difficult, as the report says, to bring home the value of the work to the public.

We cannot foretell in the multitude of words about us whose words are destined to survive, to rule, to delight, to persuade or accuse those that come after. We hope that some will so survive. All we are sure of now is that among the many men and women who have followed letters in this high hope a certain number have been overborne by evil chances, accidents, and misfortunes, which but for the mere whim of time and fortune, might have come to any one of us.

I give you, then, that you may give, “Prosperity to the Royal Literary Fund”.

A Doctor’s Work

GENTLEMEN
— It may not have escaped your professional observation that there are only two classes of mankind in the world — doctors and patients. I have had some delicacy in confessing that I have belonged to the patient class ever since a doctor told me that all patients were phenomenal liars where their own symptoms were concerned. If I dared to take advantage of this magnificent opportunity which now is before me I should like to talk to you all about my own symptoms. However, I have been ordered — on medical advice — not to talk about patients, but doctors. Speaking, then, as a patient, I should say that the average patient looks upon the average doctor very much as the non-combatant looks upon the troops fighting on his behalf. The more trained men there are between his body and the enemy the better.

I have had the good fortune this afternoon of meeting a number of trained men who, in due time, will be drafted into your permanently mobilised Army which is always in action, always under fire against death. Of course, it is a little unfortunate that Death, as the senior practitioner, is bound to win in the long run; but we noncombatants, we patients, console ourselves with the idea that it will be your business to make the best terms you can with Death on our behalf; to see how his attacks can be longest delayed or diverted, and, when he insists on driving the attack home, to see that he does it according to the rules of civilised warfare. Every sane human being is agreed that this long-drawn fight for time that we call life is one of the most important things in the world. It follows, therefore, that you, who control and oversee this fight, and who will reinforce it, must be amongst the most important people in the world. Certainly the world will treat you on that basis. It has long ago decided that you have no working hours which anybody is bound to respect, and nothing except your extreme bodily illness will excuse you in its eyes from refusing to help a man who thinks he may need your help at any hour of the day or night. Nobody will care whether you are in your bed, or in your bath, or at the theatre. If any one of the children of men has a pain or a hurt in him you will be summoned; and, as you know, what little vitality you may have accumulated in your leisure will be dragged out of you again.

In all time of flood, fire, famine, plague, pestilence, battle, murder, and sudden death it will be required of you that you report for duty at once, and go on duty at once, and that you stay on duty until your strength fails you or your conscience relieves you; whichever may be the longer period. This is your position — these are some of your obligations — and I do not think that they will grow any lighter. Have you heard of any legislation to limit
your
output? Have you heard of any Bill for an eight hours’ day for doctors? Do you know of any change in public opinion which will allow you not to attend a patient when you know that the man never means to pay you? Have you heard any outcry against those people who can really afford surgical appliances, and yet cadge round the hospitals for free advice, a cork leg, or a glass eye? I am afraid you have not.

It seems to be required of you that you must save others. It is nowhere laid down that you need save yourselves. That is to say, you belong to the privileged classes. I am sorry you have met my demonstration with a certain amount of levity. May I remind you of some of your privileges? You and Kings are the only people whose explanation the Police will accept if you exceed the legal limit in your car. On presentation of your visiting-card you can pass through the most turbulent crowd unmolested and even with applause. If you fly a yellow flag over a centre of population you can turn it into a desert. If you choose to fly a Red Cross flag over a desert you can turn it into a centre of population towards which, as I have seen, men will crawl on hands and knees. You can forbid any ship to enter any port in the world. If you think it necessary to the success of any operation in which you are interested, you can stop a 20,000-ton liner with mails in mid-ocean till the operation is concluded. You can tie up the traffic of a port without notice given. You can order whole quarters of a city to be pulled down or burnt up; and you can trust to the armed co-operation of the nearest troops to see that your prescriptions are properly carried out.

To do us poor patients justice, we do not often dispute doctor’s orders unless we are frightened or upset by a long continuance of epidemic diseases. In this case, if we are uncivilised, we say that you have poisoned the drinking-water for your own purposes, and we turn out and throw stones at you in the street. If we are civilised we do something else: but civilised people can throw stones too. You have been, and always will be, exposed to the contempt of the gifted amateur — the gentleman who knows by intuition everything that it has taken you years to learn. You have been exposed — you will always be exposed — to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world’s most bitter agonies — those people who would limit, and cripple, and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering. But you have heard this afternoon a little of the history of your profession. You will find that such people have been with you — or, rather, against you — from the very beginning, ever since, I should say, the earliest Egyptians erected images in honour of cats — and dogs — on the banks of the Nile. Yet your work goes on, and will go on.

You remain now, perhaps, the only class that cares to tell the world that we can get no more out of a machine than we put into it; that if the fathers have eaten forbidden fruit, the children’s teeth are very liable to be affected. Your training shows you, daily and hourly, that things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will be, and that we can deceive no one except ourselves when we pretend otherwise. Better still, you can prove what you have learned. If a patient chooses to disregard your warnings, you have not to wait a generation to convince him. You know you will be called in in a few days or weeks, and you will find your careless friend with a pain in his inside or a sore place on his body, precisely as you warned him would be the case. Have you ever considered what a tremendous privilege that is? At a time when few things are called by their right names — when it is against the Spirit of the Time even to hint that an act may entail consequences — you are going to join a profession in which you will be paid for telling a man the truth, and every departure you may make from the truth you will make as a concession to man’s bodily weakness, and not to your own mental weakness.

Realising these things, I do not think I need stretch your patience by talking to you about the high ideals and lofty ethics of a profession which exacts from its followers the largest responsibility and the highest death-rate — for its practitioners — of any profession in the world. If you will let me, I will wish you in your future what all men desire — enough work to do, and strength enough to do the work.

The Spirit of the Navy

IT
occurs to me that the reputation to which your Chairman alludes was achieved not by doing anything in particular, but by writing stories — telling tales if you like — about things which other men have done. They say in the Navy, I believe, that a man is often influenced throughout the whole of has career by the events of his first commission. The circumstances of my early training happened to throw me among disciplined men of action — men who belonged to one or other of the Indian Services — men who were therefore accustomed to act under orders, and to live under authority, as the good of their Service required.

My business being to write, I wrote about them and their lives. I did not realise, then, what I realised later, that the men who belong to the Services — disciplined men of action, living under authority — constitute a very small portion of our world, and do not attract much of its attention or its interest. I did not realise then that where men of all ranks work together for aims and objects which are not for their own personal advantage, there arises among them a spirit, a tradition, and an unwritten law, which it is not very easy for the world at large to understand, or to sympathise with.