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["Melody O." <melody AT crecon.com>]

Take up the White Man's burden--
 Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
 To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
 On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
 Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
 In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
 And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
 An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit, 
 And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
 The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
 And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
 The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
 Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
 No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
 The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
 The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
 And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
 And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
 The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
 (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
 Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
 Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
 To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
 By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
 Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
 Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel,
 The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
 Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
 The judgment of your peers!
Source: Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden: The United States & The
Philippine Islands, 1899." Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929). 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons
than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who
torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so
with the approval of their own conscience.”
-- C.S. Lewis

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority.
It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the
people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages
who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good
masters, but they mean to be masters.”
-- Noah Webster

"I do not fear that they [Americans] will meet with tyrants in their rulers
but rather with guardians." [A government led by such men] "does not
destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it
compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till [they
are] reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious
animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville