In Due Time, They
Will Forget How Warily Their Fathers Had To Walk In The Mahdi's Time To
Secure Even Half A Bellyful; Then, As Has Happened Elsewhere.
They will
honestly believe that they themselves originally created and since then
have upheld the easy life into which they were bought at so heavy a
price.
Then the demand will go up for 'extension of local government,'
'Soudan for the Soudanese,' and so on till the whole cycle has to be
retrodden. It is a hard law but an old one - Rome died learning it, as
our western civilisation may die - that if you give any man anything that
he has not painfully earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his
descendants your devoted enemies.
THE END
End of Letters of Travel (1892-1913), by Rudyard Kipling
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