Kipling’s American Notes
I love Rudyard Kipling’s writing. Some folks may not like him or his work, thinking him racist or imperialistic, and I won’t argue with them (not that I necessarily agree; I just don’t want an argument).
Fortunately for me, a lot of his work is public domain, and thus is available for free on the web. Lately I’ve been skimming over his American Notes, and I was intrigued by his impression of our “defenseless coasts”.
A man in the train said to me:–“We kin feed all the earth, jest as easily as we kin whip all the earth.”
Now the second statement is as false as the first is true. One of these days the respectable Republic will find this out.
Unfortunately we, the English, will never be the people to teach her; because she is a chartered libertine allowed to say and do anything she likes, from demanding the head of the empress in an editorial waste-basket, to chevying Canadian schooners up and down the Alaska Seas. It is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people, whatever they may do.
They are much too nice, in the first place, and in the second, it would throw out all the passenger traffic of the Atlantic, and upset the financial arrangements of the English syndicates who have invested their money in breweries, railways, and the like, and in the third, it’s not to be done. Everybody knows that, and no one better than the American.
He then goes on to discuss how the USA’s lack of a real navy leaves her vulnerable to an unscrupulous power that does have a navy: pay ransom or have the coastal cities shelled into oblivion:
When one hears so much of the nation that can whip the earth, it is, to say the least of it, surprising to find her so temptingly spankable.
The average American citizen seems to have a notion that any Power engaged in strife with the Star Spangled Banner will disembark men from flat-bottomed boats on a convenient beach for the purpose of being shot down by local militia. In his own simple phraseology:–“Not by a darned sight. No, sir.”
Ransom at long range will be about the size of it–cash or crash.
I bet Kipling never expected the day would come when the US Navy eclipsed the Royal Navy.
