"The White Man's Burden" is a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling. It was originally published in the popular magazine McClure's in 1899. It was a response to the U.S. taking over the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Although Kipling's poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States understood the phrase "white man's burden" as a characterization for imperialism that justified the policy as a noble enterprise.