The last stanza of the poem "The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling reads as follows:
Take up the White Man's burden -
Have done with childish days -
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgement of your peers.
In the second verse of this stanza, Kipling urges the colonized people to be done with their "childish" days. The implication of this statement is that the colonized people are like children, while the colonizers are the adults. The idea is meant to reaffirm the notion that colonized people are less capable or less developed than colonizers, and that they need help to reach a higher level of advancement.
