I think "To seek another's profit" actually refers to the people being colonised -- to those who benefit from the sacrifice made by America (in this case) and Great Britain in other cases. I don't think they saw themselves as thieves -- or not everyone did -- they saw themselves as marching into other people's countries for the benefit of the people they were invading and taking over. That's what makes Kipling so... ambiguous. He wrote beautiful, heartfelt work about the nobility and sacrifice of the white man who would work himself to death trying to civilize the rest of the world.
And that's what I think has changed -- that now we see the colonial project as a big exercise in theft. Back then, it wasn't so clear-cut. People like Kipling (probably) and many others (definitely) believed absolutely that white people were superior and their way of life was the best way of life, and they had a moral responsibility to force it (and Christianity) upon everyone else.
One piece of evidence, I think, is the way the poem was received at the time. Although you do have the evidence of its being read to argue against ratifying the Treaty of Paris (which is evidence in your favour!), there is Kipling's letter to Roosevelt which seems to be an argument in favour of taking over the Philippines for the "good" of the people who lived there.
While academics are a slippery lot and I wouldn't necessarily like to place 100% dependence on everything they write, there are people like these guys (
JB Foster,
RW McChesney - Monthly Review, 2003):
Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands,” was published in McClure’s Magazine in February 1899. It was written when the debate over ratification of the Treaty of Paris was still taking place, and while the anti-imperialist movement in the United States was loudly decrying the plan to annex the Philippines. Kipling urged the United States, with special reference to the Philippines, to join Britain in the pursuit of the racial responsibilities of empire
(my emphasis)
And
Kipling's aim was to encourage the American government to take over the Philippines, one of the territorial prizes of the Spanish-American War, and rule it with the same energy, honor, and beneficence that, he believed, characterized British rule over the nonwhite populations of India and Africa. In September he had written to Roosevelt: "Now go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears." "The White Man's Burden" repeated this advice, adding a more abstract message about the white race's superiority and responsibility to the Filipinos and the other nonwhite peoples of the world.
Bratlinger (
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 50, Number 2, 2007)
There are other examples (including the wikipedia article and this:
Rudyard Kipling – The White Man's Burden, the comments of the Kipling Society itself:
The White Man’s Burden and so on), which indicate that lots of people believe that he was being un-ironic in his support of the duty of white men to rule over others. I haven't done a proper survey -- this isn't my area -- but a random selection of the things that turn up in Google Scholar all seem to point the same way.
We know that at the time, there was a strong belief in social darwinism, and the inferiority of people who were not white upper class men. It wasn't accepted by everyone, but it was a very popular set of beliefs.
You also note little asides like in A BANK FRAUD the comment that native help can only be depended on to a very limited degree and to run a bank in India (for example) you need white men from the home country.
My inclination is to believe that if Kipling was being ironic, it backfired, and there isn't really any evidence from what he said at the time that he was being. It fits with the rest of his writing (apparently) and the weight of opinion seems to be heavily in favour of taking it at face value.
I just wondered if there had been other commentaries etc. that disagreed with this view, or if Kipling had clarified what he meant. Since most people seemed to feel he was supporting colonialism, it might have been something worth doing.
