[In the following essay, Murray analyzes the concept of law in Kipling's The Jungle Books.]

There is broad critical agreement that the concept of law is vital and pervasive in Kipling's work, and the concept has been the subject of at least one book, Shamsul Islam's Kipling's “Law”. Islam devotes considerable space to a discussion of the law in The Jungle Books, asserting that “an exposition of the nature of the Law is one of Kipling's main aims in The Jungle Books in general and the Mowgli stories in particular” (122). He highlights their didactic purpose by stating that while they are “primarily children's books, [they] are secondarily educational manuals” and that Kipling is being “didactic as well as entertaining” (121). Bonamy Dobrée agrees with these sentiments, asserting that “what Kipling felt to be essential to the Law is made plain in The Jungle Books, where it … brings into play the virtues of loyalty, keeping your promises, courage, and respect for other people” and that the law in The Jungle Books “is intended to be far from what we often casually refer to as ‘jungle law’” (67). Ironically, in the jungle, where popular usage finds no law at all, Kipling finds a detailed and pervasive, but morally neutral, code “that has arranged for almost every accident that may befall the Jungle-people” and ensures the preservation of jungle society (“How Fear Came,” Second JB [The Second Jungle Book] 3). In the village, however, he finds the disorder and improvidence that lead to its eventual destruction.

The Mowgli stories contain more than forty direct references to law,¹ and the first of the stories, “Mowgli's Brothers,” contains fifteen such references, repeatedly adverting to the “Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason” (5), and “lays down very clearly” the rights of individual wolves (10) and the procedures for solving disputes (12). Yet many critics writing in the second half of this century react to such an obviously important matter with unease, evasion, or dislike. Islam feels constrained to comment on the primitive social setting of the law to excuse the vengeful violence that Kipling's “educational manuals” contain; violent revenge, he says, “need not trouble the reader too much” (129). Elliot L. Gilbert tries to counter misgivings about the ethical nature of the law in his article “Three Criticism of The Jungle Books” by saying that the law in The Jungle Books is a “law of nature,” thereby removing all legal and ethical content from it (7). A “law of nature” is not a law in the usual sense but rather a proposition concerning the working of the universe: one cannot, for example, claim that the First Law of Thermodynamics is good or evil, desirable or otherwise, and one cannot disobey or alter it. (“Natural law,” by contrast, is law deduced from ideals of justice and human rights.)² C. S. Lewis, who cannot “understand how a man of taste could doubt that Kipling is a very great artist,” can still “recoil” from Kipling's world because it is “unendurable—a heavy, glaring, suffocating monstrosity” (99). His reaction is partly caused by ethical considerations, and he puts his finger precisely on the reason for his reaction: much of the law is a code of group survival, and is “morally neutral—the obedient servant of valour and public spirit, but equally of cruelty, extortion, oppression, and dishonesty” (115-16).

This uneasy or hostile reaction of otherwise sympathetic critics stems from their assumption of a necessary connection between law and ethics. A crucial distinction may be made among all the different conceptions of law, however, and it hinges on a single issue: whether or not there is an ethical dimension to law. Proponents of the doctrine of natural law would say that there is. On the other hand, proponents of the “analytical positivism” associated with John Austin (1790-1859), and current in English jurisprudence at the time of the writing of The Jungle Books,³ would say that there is not—as would adherents of today's “critical legal studies” movement.⁴ In the light of legal theory, Dobrée's association of the law with virtue is not a necessary one, and Islam's hopeful assertion that the “end of both law and ethics is to make man good, teaching him to practise virtue and refrain from vice” (126) is both dubious and oversimple, though it is easy enough to see why both critics write as they do. Accepting Kipling's patently didactic purpose as being appropriate in books for children, they expect Kipling's law to embody ethics, and therefore have to assert that it does so despite its apparent ethical poverty. They also have to excuse the brutality and occasional arbitrariness in the application of the law.

Further, along with Lewis, whose objection to the moral neutrality of Kipling's law has already been noted, they are writing in the third quarter of the twentieth century, unavoidably aware of such instances of arbitrary but legal violence as the Holocaust and the Gulag Archipelago, and of “the testimony of those who have descended into Hell, and, like Ulysses or Dante, brought back a message for human beings. Only in this case Hell was not beneath or beyond the earth but on it; it was a Hell created on earth by men for other men” (Hart, “Positivism” 615-16). The Nuremberg and Eichmann trials brought into high relief the conflict between inviolable human rights, as propounded by theories of natural law, and the unlimited legality of the commands of a sovereign state, as propounded by theories of analytical positivism. Though both trials were conducted under positive law, both raised the question, “Is there a higher law which could render such acts [as the Holocaust] punishable whatever might be the decrees of a particular state to which the accused owed allegiance?” (Lloyd 88).⁵ To a degree, such an international statement of values as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sought in 1948 to supply such a higher law, and though the “tendency of the present day is to formulate these values in specifically positive-law terms, the natural-law origin of this mode of approach still remains fairly apparent” (Lloyd 141). The experience of critics who lived through the Second World War and its aftermath may well place them in the position described by Lon L. Fuller: “[I]f you were raised with a generation that said ‘law is law’ and meant it, you may feel the only way you can escape one law is to set another off against it, and this perforce must be a ‘higher law’” (660).

Though Kipling was no legal theorist, he was a child of his time in his imperialism, in his trust in practical science, observation, and experience, and in his distrust of metaphysics. It is not surprising that his concept of law shows practicality and lacks idealism; it is even less surprising, given his imperialist attitudes, that a theory of law that Wolfgant Friedmann says “enabled the rising national State to assert its authority undisturbed by juristic doubts” (Legal Theory 378) should have appealed to him. When Kipling returned to India in 1882 he was entering a country whose rulers were retreating from an “earlier emphasis on moral force and the influence of the example of British character, to the less ambitious idea that India was held simply by military power” (Hutchins 186). He encountered what one of India's leading officials called, in a letter to The Times on March 1, 1883, “an absolute government, founded not on consent, but on conquest” (8). The writer of that letter, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was a “highly respected commentator” (Wurgaft 71) whose influence upon the Indian Civil Service, especially upon its legal codes, was considerable:

He was its political philosopher and gave to its prejudices and emotions a reasoned and logical support. He showed how a man could consistently favour every aspect of a free society and yet deny the gift of political freedom itself. In this he was standing in the line of intellectual Liberals whose most distinguished representative had been John Austin, one of the fountain-heads of Stephen's philosophy of law.

[Stokes 305]

Stephen infused Austinian legal theory into the Indian Civil Service. “I had charge of the Code [of Criminal Procedure] of 1872, and carried it through the Legislative Council,” he wrote in the chapter on Indian criminal law in his History of the Criminal Law of England (3.345). Austin's opinion about “higher law” is unequivocal: “Now, to say that human laws which conflict with the Divine law are not binding, that is to say, are not laws, is to talk stark nonsense” (185). Further, says Austin, because the Roman notion of ius gentium is often associated with belief in a moral instinct or in innate practical principles, “it ought to be expelled, with the natural law of the moderns, from the sciences of jurisprudence and morality” (179). Stephen's description of Indian criminal law shows a similar distaste for “higher law”:

The Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the institutions which they regulate, are somewhat grim presents for one people to make to another, and are little calculated to excite affection; but they are eminently well calculated to protect peaceable men and to beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect, and to enforce obedience.

[History 3.345]

Critics who consciously or unconsciously believe in a necessary connection between law and morality balk at analytical positivism, and by extension at its literary embodiment in works like the Mowgli stories in The Jungle Books, all the more so because they are children's stories. Nevertheless, though Kipling was writing for children in The Jungle Books, and though one might therefore expect him to inculcate ethics rather than expediency, the exposition of the law in Kipling's Mowgli stories follows the notions of analytical positivism closely. An explanation of how this is so requires a brief summary of the main tenets of analytical positivism and natural law.

In the second edition of Legal Theory Friedmann conveniently and lucidly sums up Austin's positivism in a set of propositions, of which the most important are:

Positive law and ideal law (or ethics) must be kept strictly distinct. Law cannot be defined by reference to any ideal of justice.

All positive law is deduced from a clearly determinable lawgiver as sovereign. … [This] may be an individual or a body or aggregate of individuals.

The essence of all law is the command addressed by the sovereign to the subject, coupled with the threat of sanction if the command is disobeyed.

The sovereign is not himself bound by any legal limitations.

[145]

Against these propositions one may range those of natural law, which is inspired in its many forms by “two ideas, of a universal order governing all men, and of the inalienable rights of the individual” (Friedmann, Legal Theory 16). Using Friedmann's discussion of the French jurist François Gény (1861-1959), I have constructed a parallel set of propositions that clearly reveals the distinction between natural law theory and that of Austin:

Positive and ideal law cannot be separated. Law must ultimately be defined by reference to an ideal of justice.

Natural law is the basis of positive law and would include “the fundamental postulates of justice such as the sanctity of human life, the development of human faculties and … freedom of thought and inviolability of the person.”

[223]

The essence of all law is the application of the “immutable and universal factors” [222] of natural law in terms of positive law.

The sovereign is bound by legal limitations, and in the extreme case of “the oppression of despotic laws … natural law would legitimate rebellion.”

[224]

Application of these two sets of propositions to the Mowgli stories shows that Kipling assumes the analytical positivism of Austin, Stephen, and the Indian Civil Service, rather than natural law doctrine, as a basis of the Law of the Jungle.

In “How Fear Came” Kipling deduces the law “from a clearly determinable law-giver as sovereign” in the person of Tha, “the Lord of the Jungle” and “the First of the Elephants” (Second JB 20). The reason put forward for the imposition of law is not ethics but expediency. The establishment of a law that all must obey is required because the tiger's brutality and the ape's fecklessness have brought fear and shame to the jungle (20). The Mowgli stories also embody the Austinian proposition concerning the application of law, that the “essence of all law is a command addressed by the sovereign to the subject, coupled with the threat of sanction if the command is disobeyed.” Hathi, the descendant of Tha, is sovereign; even Shere Khan knows “what every one else knows—that when the last comes to the last, Hathi is Master of the Jungle” (15-16). In “How Fear Came” Hathi condemns Shere Khan's boast of killing man by choice, and, supported by his sons, orders the tiger away from the river, but he does not deny the legality of Shere Khan's actions (15).

Kipling follows Austin's contention that law and ethics should “be kept strictly distinct.” The rules of what Kipling calls law are not ethically based but are, rather, “positive laws” designed to ensure self-preservation or the preservation of society. In “The Law of the Jungle” verse at the end of “How Fear Came” (29-32) Kipling does not refer “to any ideal of justice” involved in obeying the law. Instead, he refers to the law in terms of self-interest and “the threat of sanction if the command is disobeyed”: “[T]he Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die” (line 2; Kipling's italics). In line after line, the verse inculcates utilitarian principles: cleanliness (5), adequacy of sleep (6), avoidance of danger from larger animals (9-10), avoidance of unnecessary conflict (11-12), limitation of internecine violence (13-14), construction of secure shelter (15-18), efficiency and avoidance of waste in hunting (19-21), avoidance of the retribution consequent upon killing man (22), sharing of food with other pack members, especially cubs and breeding females (23-32), and freedom of males to hunt solely for their own families (33-34). Apart from the injunctions to the young to be clean and polite, all of the remaining rules, including the prohibition against killing man, are designed to ensure that every member of the pack, strong or weak, has sufficient food to survive and does not run unnecessary risks of violence from within the pack, from other packs, or from “white men on elephants” (“Mowgli's Brothers,” JB [The Jungle Book] 5) who hunt down man-killers. Where there is no stated law, Kipling advocates Machiavellian guile and force: “Because of his age and his cunning, because of his gripe and his paw, / In all that the Law leaveth open, the word of the Head Wolf is Law” (“The Law of the Jungle” lines 35-36, Second JB 32). As a contrast to the law-abiding wolves, Kipling presents the monkeys as ineffectual, foolish outcasts because they do not submit their wills to law and to a leader in order to proceed toward goals in a disciplined fashion. He contrasts the effects of lawlessness and discipline. Lawlessness results in wolves “lame from traps … [limping] from shot-wounds … mangy from eating bad food” (“Tiger-Tiger!” JB 90-91). Discipline has the effect that “no stranger cared to break into the jungles … the young wolves grew fat and strong, and there were many cubs” (“Red Dog,” Second JB 223). None of these outcomes, desirable or otherwise, is an ethical matter.

For Kipling, law is a matter of group cohesion and self-preservation rather than ethics, as Noel Annan notes in his essay “Kipling's Place in the History of Ideas.” Nevertheless, Annan is as mistaken as Martin Seymour-Smith says he is (241) in trying to connect Kipling's concern for the survival of the group with the ideas of such social theorists as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Vilfredo Pareto. Rather, Kipling acquired that concern in India, which was, in effect, an occupied country ruled on the basis of the Austinian proposition that the “essence of all law is the command addressed by the sovereign to the subject, coupled with the threat of sanction if the command is disobeyed.” As Stephen argued in the 1883 letter to The Times already quoted:

[I]t is impossible to imagine any policy more fearfully dangerous and more certain, in the case of failure, to lead to results to which the Mutiny would be child's play than the policy of shifting the foundations on which the British Government of India rests. It is essentially an absolute Government, founded, not on consent, but on conquest, … and no anomaly can be more striking or so dangerous, as its administration by men, who being at the head of a Government founded upon conquest, implying at every point the superiority of the conquering race … and having no justification for its existence except that superiority, shrink from the open, uncompromising, straight-forward assertion of it.

[8]

Kipling has no qualms about such an assertion, and shares Jeremy Bentham's and Austin's liking for military efficiency: “The cohesion, discipline, and perfect subordination of a military body, which worked almost in silence with the minimum of discussion and crisp commands, appeared to such minds a thing of intellectual beauty” (Stokes 309). In “Servants of the Queen” Kipling celebrates the frightening power achieved by perfect obedience to the chain of command stretching from the animals used by the army to the empress (JB 208) and the effect of that power in maintaining the empire: “And for that reason … your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy” (JB 209).⁶ Kipling further stresses unquestioning obedience in “The Parade Song of the Camp Animals” at the end of the story; even the men who lead the animals “cannot tell why we or they / March and suffer day by day” (JB 212).

Further, Kipling's law ensures that power is passed on to a sovereign able to enforce “the threat of sanction if the command is disobeyed.” When “a leader of the pack has missed his kill, he is called the Dead Wolf as long as he lives, which is not long” (“Mowgli's Brothers,” JB 26), and a new leader must “[fight] his way to the leadership of the pack according to the Jungle Law” (“Red Dog,” Second JB 280).⁷ Kipling shares such social Darwinism with Stephen, who proclaimed in another letter to The Times on January 4, 1878:

I for one, feel no shame when I think of the great competitive examination which has lasted for just 100 years, and of which the first paper was set upon the field of Plassey, and the last (for the present) under the walls of Delhi and Lucknow.

[3]

For Kipling and Stephen, effective rule based upon obedience, not ethics, is of paramount importance.

Kipling places no limitations whatever upon obedience to the law: “the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!” (“The Law of the Jungle,” line 38, Second JB 32). Nor does he sanction rebellion against “the oppression of despotic laws.” He demands complete obedience of Mowgli with respect to human law when Mowgli leaves the jungle, even when such law is unfair or outdated:

Keep the Law the man pack make—
For thy blind old Baloo's sake!
Clean or tainted, hot or stale,
Hold it as it were the trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.

[“The Outsong,” lines 3–8, Second JB 296]

As a man, Mowgli is not subject to the Law of the Jungle, even though he knows its code thoroughly. This consideration explains Bagheera's comment that “there is more in the jungle now than Jungle Law, Baloo” when Mowgli refuses to give a reason for all that he chooses to do in “Letting in the Jungle” (Second JB 67), and it also explains Mowgli's treatment of Hathi in that story. Because Hathi is sovereign in the jungle, Mowgli cannot force Hathi to help him in obliterating the village. Mowgli can, however, form an alliance with Hathi on the basis of shared hatred of men who have trapped and scarred Hathi and who use the ankus to “teach [elephants] Man's Law” (“The King's Ankus,” Second JB 166). Bagheera's “terror” and his exclamations to the effect that Mowgli is “Master of the jungle” (“Letting in the Jungle,” Second JB 95) are not expressions of approbation of an act sanctioned by ethics or by previous law. Rather, Mowgli has become a human pack-leader of exceptional power who, in “Red Dog,” uses his intelligence for unselfish ends to save the pack, but in “Letting in the Jungle” imposes his will upon the jungle animals through his human superiority and through an alliance with the sovereign of the jungle in order to exact personal revenge.

For a reader who subscribes to the theory of natural law, the case of revenge and exemplary destruction raises the matter of law and ethics inescapably. Kipling depicts Mowgli's revenge as a good thing; Mowgli enjoys having the “good conscience that comes from paying a just debt” (“Red Dog,” Second JB 221). Yet in his “rage and hate” (“Letting in the Jungle,” Second JB 95) Mowgli's indiscriminate destruction of the village lacks even the crude limitations of the lex talionis: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand … burn for burn” (Exodus 21:23-25). The victims of injustice are little better: Messua's husband intends to use English justice for revenge also, in “a lawsuit … as shall eat this village to the bone” (“Letting in the Jungle,” Second JB 83). In Austin's eyes both of these actions are legitimate, simply because Mowgli, Hathi, and the English are able to enforce obedience. Kipling clearly demonstrates that the ultimate sanction ensuring such obedience and causing Bagheera's fear is the deliberate, premeditated, disciplined use of force. The same state of affairs held good in British India, though at the time of the writing of The Jungle Books, when the vast bulk of Indian society accepted British rule, the smug Austinian view that Stephen expressed in 1883 was not far from the truth:

If it is asked how the system works in practice, I can only say that it enables a handful of foreigners (I am far from thinking that if they were more sympathetic they would be more efficient) to rule justly and firmly about 200,000,000 persons, of many races, languages, and creeds, and, in many parts of the country, bold, sturdy, and warlike.

[History 3.344]

In the face of mounting nationalist resistance, however, the nakedness of the organized force behind British rule, like that behind the power of Mowgli and Hathi, manifested itself in law in the Rowlatt Acts, and in action in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre led by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer in April 1919—action that would probably have been classed as a “war crime” after 1945.

Though the government of India vehemently dissociated itself from such a policy of intimidation, Dyer was expressing the general attitude of many of the civil and military in India. Dyer was removed from his command, but his actions (and presumably his motives) were supported by a large section of the British press as well as by members of parliament and others. A sum of £26,000 was subscribed as a testimonial for this gallant British soldier.

[Edwardes 202]

Ten pounds of that Morning Post fund came from Rudyard Kipling (Draper 238).

Gandhi's use of nonviolent noncooperation repeatedly contested the moral neutrality of analytical positivism and showed again and again the ultimate brutality behind colonial rule. “Letting in the Jungle,” more than any other story in The Jungle Books, depicts the organized force through which obedience is secured with a relish that readily explains C. S. Lewis's belief that Kipling could make the law the “servant … of cruelty [and] oppression.” In Austinian terms, however, Kipling is doing no more than telling the unvarnished truth about the nature of law.

Proponents of natural law cannot avoid the issue of the nonethical nature of Kipling's law by arguing that it is not to be applied outside the jungle, because such an argument denies the clearly didactic purpose of the Mowgli stories, especially the explicit parallel between undisciplined monkeys and undisciplined humans in “Kaa's Hunting.” As Mark Paffard points out, “there is an unmistakable similarity between the Bandar-Log … and the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels. Both are species of monkeys, and both are portrayed as idle and senseless because they lack any organisation or any code of social conduct” (93). In addition, Mowgli's revenge applies outside the world of animals, and “The Outsong” at the end of The Second Jungle Book (296-99) enjoins upon Mowgli unswerving obedience to human law, no matter how defective or unpleasant.

Apart from the rules for self-preservation and the right of sovereigns, the law in the Mowgli stories contains only contracts: the curious, almost totemic injunction to Mowgli never to “kill … any cattle young or old” because of the “price of the bull's life” (“Mowgli's Brothers,” JB 26); the contract under which Mowgli is entered into the pack and released from it; the contract under which Mowgli pays for a knife found “round the neck of a man who had been killed by a wild boar” (“Red Dog,” Second JB 222) by killing the boar. Mowgli's undertaking to fight the dholes with the pack in “Red Dog,” however, is based on Mowgli's love for Akela and his wolf parents and siblings, and is a personal agreement. In fact, as Kaa points out, Mowgli's undertaking is imprudent: “And thou hast tied thyself into a death-knot for the sake of the memory of dead wolves?” (232). There is love in the jungle, but it is not part of the law, just as there was, among some members of the Indian Civil Service, a genuine regard for the people they ruled that could never outweigh the need to maintain a clear separation between governors and governed.

An understanding of the disparity between Austin's theory of law and that of natural law explains the problems of some modern critics in reconciling the nonethical nature of the law in the Mowgli stories with their didacticism. Kipling's law, despite what sympathetic readers of the third quarter of this century would like it to be, is “morally neutral” just as British legal thinking of his day was morally neutral. By contrast, the standpoint of many twentieth-century readers and critics is that of the famous jurist Lauterpacht: “We would rather err in pursuit of a good life for all than glory in the secure infallibility of moral indifference” (136). Our conscious or unconscious assumption of a connection between law and ethics explains modern critical response to Kipling's exposition of law, ranging from unfounded approbation in Dobrée, to excuse in Islam, to evasion in Gilbert, to condemnation in Lewis. Despite what such critics might wish, Kipling's law was never intended to make his readers good. Rather, it was intended to make them safe citizens at home and effective rulers in the colonies.

Notes

1. The references in The Jungle Book are as follows: in “Mowgli's Brothers,” 4, 5, 10, 12 (twice), 13 (twice), 14 (twice), 17, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27; in “Kaa's Hunting,” 32 (twice), 33, 34, 36, 37, 51, 52, 63 (thrice); in “Tiger-Tiger!” 71. The references in The Second Jungle Book are as follows: “How Fear Came,” 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20 (twice); the whole of “The Law of the Jungle” (29-32); “Letting in the Jungle,” 67, 74 (twice), 82; “Red Dog,” 223 (twice); “The Spring Running,” 273 (twice), 292, 293; “The Outsong,” 296, 297.

2. “Natural law” was adumbrated in classical Greece, developed in the ius gentium of Roman law, formed an essential part of the theological and philosophical system of Thomas Aquinas, and grew from the ideas of Hobbes and Locke into the declarations of rights and the constitutions promulgated during the American and French revolutions. Its most influential contemporary theorist is John Finnis (Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).

3. “Analytical positivism” stems from the legal theory developed from Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian philosophy by John Austin (1790-1859). Though his writings were much admired by the Benthamite circle, they had little influence in his lifetime. With the posthumous publication in 1863 of the whole of his work, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined and Lectures on Jurisprudence: Or, the Philosophy of Positive Law, “his ideas came to dominate English jurisprudence, which for long remained analytical in character” (Hart, “Austin” 472). His theory had a direct influence on the Indian Civil Service through James Fitzjames Stephen (Stokes 305), and is still influential in the work of H. L. A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin.

4. The critical legal studies movement regards much legal theory as “the perennial effort to restate power and preconception as right” (Unger 674). “Its point of departure has been the thesis that law and legal doctrine reflect, confirm, and reshape the social divisions and hierarchies inherent in a type or stage of social organization such as ‘capitalism’” (Unger 563n).

5. As Wolfgang Friedmann notes, the members of the Nuremberg Tribunal derived their jurisdiction from the Nuremberg Charter, “basing themselves on the binding force of the positive law imposed upon Germany by virtue of the Allied Military Government.” At the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, however, “there were indeed hints that individuals had legal duties higher than those of obedience to the positive law of their sovereign” (Law in a Changing Society, 41). Eichmann's trial was based upon a positive Israeli law passed retrospectively, “though many of its provisions, such as those dealing with ‘crimes against humanity,’ had a natural-law ring about them” (Lloyd 81).

6. A similar description occurs in another story about the necessity for unquestioning obedience, “The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin,” in Plain Tales from the Hills (98).

7. Kipling may possibly have had in mind the ritual killing of the priest of Nemi described in Frazer's The Golden Bough. As Nora Crook points out, Kipling met Frazer in 1921 when both men received honorary degrees from the Sorbonne, but Kipling may well have read Frazer long before. He “owned a volume of Frazer's Folklore in the Old Testament … and his annotated translation of Apollodorus (Bateman's). The ‘Neminaka cafe’ in ‘Dayspring Mishandled,’ which treats the literary world as a cut-throat priesthood, probably derives from Chapter 1 of The Golden Bough” (183n).

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———. Letter. The Times. January 4, 1878: 3

———. Letter. The Times. March 1, 1883: 8.

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