Published: Unpublished, but included in Harbord's privately printed Readers’ Guide to Rudyard Kipling's Work, v, 2618–30.

Attribution: The text in the Readers’ Guide is from a typescript then in the possession of H. Dunscombe Colt. Colt's Kipling collection was given to the Library of Congress, 1984–5, but the typescript of ‘The Cause of Humanity’ was not included in the gift and its whereabouts are currently unknown.

The typescript of the story was sold at Sotheby's, 10 December 1968, as by Rudyard Kipling, ‘with extensive autograph revisions and additions’; no provenance was given. Since the present location of the typescript is unknown, any further evidence of RK's authorship that might appear from an examination of the typescript is not available. The CK Diary for 12 June 1914 has the following entry: ‘Rud at work on two stories: The Stolen Tide / The [] of Humanity’. The transcriber was unable to construe the missing word or words, but the entry is close to the title of the typescript and the date of the entry fits the internal evidence in the story. I think it likely that the outbreak of the First World War in August and the wholesale slaughter that it produced gave RK a reason not to publish the story.

Text: Harbord.

Notes: Harbord's text, presumably a faithful copy of the typescript, contains many irregularities and repetitions. I have left them unchanged, except that where a speech is provided with only one quotation mark, either at the beginning or end, I have supplied the missing mark. I have also corrected a few mistakes that seemed inadvertent misspellings, e.g., ‘then’ for ‘there’, or impossible meanings, e.g., ‘more’ for ‘none’ in a verse quoted from the Book of Job.

‘The Cause of Humanity’ is not yet recorded in any bibliography.

Two burst tyres in ten minutes, seven miles from everywhere had forced the traveller to spend the rest of the night out of doors. He pushed his car on to a triangular slip of common, put up the hood and arranged the rugs. It was warm summer and when all was quiet again, rabbits stole out and danced in the moonlight.