According to the poem "White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling, what are the costs and benefits of colonizing new areas?

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In “The White Man’s Burden,” Kipling argues that there are many costs and really very few benefits to colonizing new areas, at least for the white people who colonize those areas.  The people who get colonized gain from being colonized, but the colonizers generally get nothing but, perhaps, the approval of other European/white countries.

Throughout the poem, Kipling emphasizes the negative aspects of colonization.  In the first stanza, he points out that it is hard work, far from home.  He says that the colonizers go into “exile” and have to “wait in heavy harness.”  In the second stanza, he reminds the colonizers that they do not get the benefits of their efforts.  Instead, they have

To seek another's profit,

And work another's gain.

Kipling then tells us that the white colonizers will be frustrated.  They will work hard to help the colonized people, but then, when they have almost achieved their goals, the colonized peoples’ “sloth and heathen folly” will ruin all they have been working on.  Moreover, the colonized people will not even appreciate the colonizers.  Instead, they will resent the colonizers for forcibly pulling them out of “bondage” and their “loved Egyptian night.”

In short, there are tremendous costs involved in colonization.  The white people have to exile themselves to foreign lands where they work hard to try to help other people.  The people they are working to help will tend to destroy the things they are trying to do and will end up resenting them as well.  Thus, colonization is rather onerous and burdensome.

It is only in the last stanza that we get any indication of how the white people will benefit from colonization.  In that stanza, we are told that, at least, their peers will respect them.  The colonizers will show that they have reached the highest echelon of world powers.  They will “have done with childish days” and will instead get wisdom and be judged by their peers.  This is really the only benefit the colonizers get—they get the chance to grow up, push themselves, and enter a more prestigious peer group.