Life, 1892-05-19 · page 9 of 18
Life — May 19, 1892 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis of Life Magazine Page 315 This page features **Rudyard Kipling's critique of New York City**, published in the London *Times*. The accompanying illustration shows a domestic scene where a woman tells a man, "I do wish people had their second childhood first; then they'd be old enough to know better than to cry so!" Kipling's lengthy text attacks New York's governance and corruption, particularly targeting what he calls the city's moral decay. He criticizes municipal mismanagement, police inefficiency, poor sanitation, and street conditions. Kipling sardonically contrasts New York's claims to superiority with its actual dysfunction, suggesting the city's government represents "a despotism of the alien by the alien." The satirical point: American self-regard versus observable reality.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
May 16, 1874. FIRST BEE-KEEPERS' ASSOCIATION FOUNDED. Mrs. H.: Dear, Dear! 1 po WISH PEOPLE HAD THEIR SECOND CHILDHOOD FIRST; THEN THEY'D BE OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER THAN TO CRY So! EVEN SO. R. RUDYARD KIPLING'S impressions of New York City, as published in the London 7Z?mes, are well worth reading. That we are a superior people is. generally admitted by ourselves, and possibly the fact that we are happy in our filth and general corruption is not to our discredit. Being thus happy, it may be unwise to attach too much importance to outside criticism. Here are some of Mr. Kipling’s statements, and nothing truer was ever said of this extraordinary city : ‘The more I studied it the more grotesquely bad it grew. It was bad in the paving of its streets, bad in its police management, and bad in its sanitary arrangements. No one that I talked to has approached the management of New York ina proper sprit, regarding it as the JAPANESE EMBASSY RECEIVED BY PRESIDENT BUCHANAN AT shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. WASHINGTON, “In a heathen land three things are supposed to be the pillars of a moderately decent government, They are:, Regard for human life; justice, criminal and civil, and good roads. Yet in this Christian city they think lightly of the first; their own papers, their own speech, and their own actions prove it. They buy and sell the second at a certain price, openly and without shame, and are apparently content to do without the third. ‘The blame of their city evils is not altogether with the gentlemen, chiefly of foreign extraction, who control the city. These find the peo- ple made to their hand—a lawless breed, ready to wink at one evasion of the law if they may profit by another, and in their rare hours of leisure content to smile over the details of a clever fraud. “ There is nothing more delightful than to sit, for a strictly limited time, with a child who tells you what he means to be when a man, But when the same child—loud-voiced, insistent and unblushingly eager for praise, but as thin-skinned as the most morbid hobbledehoy— stands about all your ways, telling you the same story in the same voice, you begin to yearn for somebody finished—say, Egypt and a completely dead mummy. “It is neither seemly nor safe to hint that the government of the largest city in the United States is a despotism of the alien by the alien, DINIZULU, SON OF CETYWAYO, CROWNED KING OF ZULULAND. for the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk.” comicbooks.com