14 JANUARY 1899, Page 3

The letter lately contributed by Mr. Rudyard Kipling to the

New York World on the Imperialist policy of the United States is too good to be monopolised by one side of the Atlantic. " We are only," he writes, "at the beginning of that era of good feeling between the two nations, Great Britain and the United States. When America sets her hand to administer with show of force races helpless in themselves for good government, when she creates roads, drains, schools, hospitals, and an elementary form of justice in countries where they do not now exist, using her best men freely for the work, she will, I fancy, find herself even better understood and appreciated by Great Britain than she is to-day. After a nation has pur- sued certain paths alone in the face of some slight misrepre- sentation, it is consoling to find another nation (which one can address without a dictionary) preparing to walk along the same lines to, I doubt not, the same ends." In spite of his unflattering criticism on former occasions, Mr. Kipling speaks for England in the ear of America with more force and weight than any other English writer, and we are not sorry that he should have chosen a " yellow" journal as the medium for such a communication. Readers of a Jingo Press all the world over need to be reminded that empire has its duties as well as its rights.