Still taking up the White Man’s Burden of protecting “natives” from each other

Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5]