It is interesting to note that the villagers and not the British are associated with killing “for sport.” Of course killing for sport—big game hunting—was a favorite pastime among Europeans in India. Seeking revenge against the “Man-Pack” for threatening his life and the lives of his foster parents, Mowgli commands Hathi the elephant and his sons to “let in the Jungle upon that village” (p. 237). Mowgli then leads the elephants and all the creatures of the jungle against the village. In this attack, Kipling not only highlights the evils of human civilization—at least as it is manifest in an Indian village—but he emphasizes the power of the hybrid outsider to combat these apparent ills of wanton cruelty and superstition.

Significantly, Kipling positions British “progress” on the same side as Jungle Law. The English in this story, though unseen, are presented as a force that, like Mowgli, is capable of effecting “justice”; Mowgli’s surrogate parents, Messua and her husband, flee the violence of the villagers and seek “a great justice” from the British in Kanhiwara. Mowgli tells them, “I do not know what justice is, but—come next Rains and see what is left” (p. 231). By the time the British arrive to punish the unjust villagers, the village will be leveled and abandoned: That is Mowgli’s “justice.” Mowgli can be seen here to express the hidden brutality of British “justice”; through the vehicle of this Indian boy, Kipling expresses the impulse to destroy a culture deemed lawless and corrupt, whose superstitiousness is shown in several stories to be not only absurd but pernicious. Kipling combines a Rousseauian Romanticism that deems all civilization corrupt and a jingoism that exempts British civilization from this censure.

Kipling’s preoccupation with the Law and his insistence on its centrality in the Mowgli stories has been seen by critics as a response to his impressions of American lawlessness. In his memoir and in letters of the period, Kipling alludes to his belief that American society was plagued by a distasteful and disturbing disorder. In 1893 he wrote to W. E. Henley that America has “no law that need be obeyed.” In another letter from this period he described America as “barbarism, barbarism plus telephone, electric light, railway and suffrage.” Though Kipling clearly associated America with lawlessness, the centrality of the Law in The Jungle Books can also be seen in the context of broader anxieties about lawlessness in British culture at the time. The Jungle Books were composed only twenty-five years after the publication of Matthew Arnold’s widely read Culture and Anarchy (1869). In this work, Arnold, whose writings Kipling first read and admired when he was in his teens, warns the English against worshiping freedom as an end in itself. Such worship, he concludes, leads to rampant anarchy—everyone merely “doing as one likes.” The conclusion of “Her Majesty’s Servants” echoes Arnold’s charge. After the officer describes to the Asian chief the intricate hierarchy of power that organizes the parading men and animals, the chief replies, “Would it were so in Afghanistan ... for there we obey only our own wills” (p. 166).

Kipling firmly believed that the British Empire, like Jungle Law, produced order in a chaotic and godless world. At the same time, he believed that it promoted manliness and character in those who engaged in its civilizing mission, those who shouldered what he notoriously dubbed “the white man’s burden.” Jingoism was rampant in England in the 1890s, when Kipling rose to fame. He delivered his vision of a fascinating yet chaotically teeming India to eager British audiences, linking India to the heart of modernity’s “darkness”: social disorder. In The Jungle Books he provides an antidote, Mowgli, who combats disorder symbolically by ensuring that the animals abide by their own Law. Kipling distinguishes Mowgli from the other animals in his position outside the Law. Because Mowgli is not really a part of the jungle, he is not bound by Jungle Law; he only chooses to follow it. Whereas Arnold’s antidote for this plague of anarchy was high “culture,” Kipling’s is a voluntary acceptance of nature’s Law.

THE ECUMENICAL VISION

Though the Mowgli stories consistently denigrate “men” and their ways, the attitudes toward fraternal solidarity they express correspond to ideals of manliness and gentlemanliness commonly held during the Victorian period. For example, Mowgli’s wolf pack in many ways matches Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s idealized representations of bands of “brothers” who work together, following a set of strict principles. Through their adherence to such a code, these groups, including the soldiers in “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the knights in the Arthurian poems, demonstrate honor. Unlike these examples, however, Kipling’s idealized male troop in the Mowgli stories is strikingly heterogeneous, the Jungle Law binding together members of different species. In 1889, several years before he began to work on the Jungle Book stories, Kipling imagined manly bonds forged across social divides in his well-known poem “The Ballad of East and West.” Here Kipling asserts, “there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!” The strength that Kipling emphasizes here is also stressed in descriptions of the binding nature of Jungle Law: “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack” (p.