people need to be policed, and civilized.

Throughout the poem, Kipling characterizes the people of the Philippine Islands as ignorant and primitive, and in doing so, he adds weight to the implication that these people need to be civilized. In the third stanza, Kipling calls the people of the Philippine Islands "savage," and in the fourth stanza he calls them "tawdry." In the penultimate stanza of the poem, he calls them "sullen peoples."

At the end of the poem, Kipling says that the US needs to win the war to put an end to "childish days." The implication here is that, left to their own devices, the people of the Philippine Islands would be "childish," meaning uneducated, petulant, and incapable of self-government.

Kipling repeatedly uses pejorative language to describe the people of the Philippine Islands to suggest that it is indeed a responsibility, or "burden," of white people to conquer and control their supposedly less civilized neighbors. This is of course a much more palatable rationale for invading another country than simply admitting that the invasion is motivated by imperialist greed.

The title of Kipling's “The White Man's Burden” has been a source of huge controversy for many years. It appears somewhat perverse (to put it mildly) to argue that the colonial project to which it refers was any kind of burden for those who carried it out. From what we now know of the horrors of colonialism, the burden fell upon the shoulders of those Indigenous people exploited and enslaved by their colonial overlords.

Suffice to say, that's not how Kipling sees things. As an ardent supporter of the Raj, the British rule of India, he naturally looks upon the colonial project with smiling benevolence, regarding it as ultimately redounding to the benefit of colonizer and colonized alike.

That said, Kipling is keen to stress to his American audience that colonial rule is no walk in the park. It is a long, hard, difficult process that requires much care and effort. In particular, he's at pains to emphasize just how thankless a task it is—how the supposedly noble, heroic efforts of white colonialists will be unappreciated by their “new-caught sullen peoples.”

Nowadays, we might ask why colonized peoples would expect to be grateful for someone coming along and taking control of their land. But none of this matters to Kipling. He, and the American white imperialists to whom the addresses the poem, share the fashionable racist belief that the Indigenous people of the Philippines are inferior to the white man and therefore in dire need of his civilizing influence.