Page:America Today, Observations and Reflections.djvu/174

 chooses to "take up the white man's burden" in the Kiplingesque sense, it would ill become England to object; but her doing so is by no means a condition of England's sympathy. It might seem, indeed, that she had plenty of "white man's burden" to shoulder within her own continental boundaries; but that is a matter which she is entirely competent to determine for herself.

Most of all must we beware of anything that can encourage an impression, already too prevalent in America, that we find the "white man's burden" too heavy for us, and are anxious to share it with the United States. This suspicion is very generally felt and very openly expressed. Take, for instance, this paragraph from an editorial in one of the leading Chicago papers:

Here, again, is another journalistic straw floating on the stream:

In a rather low-class farce which I saw in a