There is no one who is more sentimental than liberal capitalists and imperialists of the Anglo variety, or so says Conrad in _Nostromo_. Here's Charles Gould, an Englishman who inherits a silver mine from his father, with his faith that the security that money-making demands can be shared with an oppressed people and will bring a better justice afterward to a South American country prone to lawlessness and disorder of frequent regime changes:
***** "...What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security. Any one can declaim about these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That's how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That's your ray of hope." His arm pressed her slight form closer to his side for a moment. "And who knows whether in that sense even the San Tome mine may not become that little rift in the darkness which poor father despaired of ever seeing?" *****
What Gould may believe to be an unsentimentally materialist view, however, is in fact a sentimental idealism that cannot help attaching "a strange idea of justice" to "this 'Imperium in Imperio,' this wealth-producing thing," according to Martin Decoud, an alter ego of Conrad:
***** El Rey de Sulaco [Charles Gould] thinks himself, no doubt, a very honest man. And so he is, if one could look behind his taciturnity. Perhaps he thinks that this alone makes his honesty unstained. Those Englishmen live on illusions which somehow or other help them to get a firm hold of the substance....The thing was to make him present the affair to Holroyd (the Steel and Silver King) in such a manner as to secure his financial support....And as long as the treasure flowed north, without a break, that utter sentimentalist, Holroyd, would not drop his idea of introducing, not only justice, industry, peace, to the benighted continents, but also that pet dream of his of a purer form of Christianity....
...The real objective is the San Tome mine itself, as you may well imagine; otherwise the Occidental Province would have been, no doubt, left alone for many weeks, to be gathered at leisure into the arms of the victorious party. Don Carlos Gould will have enough to do to save his mine, with its organization and its people; this 'Imperium in Imperio,' this wealth-producing thing, to which his sentimentalism attaches a strange idea of justice.
(Joseph Conrad, _Nostromo_, Part 2 "The Isabels," Chapter 7) *****
And then, through Dr. Monygham (another alter ego of the author), Conrad anticipates the "resentment, bloodshed, and vengeance" that the weight of liberal capitalism and imperialism -- as heavy as the "barbarism, cruelty, and misrule" of indigenous varieties -- upon the oppressed people will provoke:
***** "There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman....Mrs. Gould, the time approaches when all that the Gould Concession stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back."
"How can you say that, Dr. Monygham?" she cried out, as if hurt in the most sensitive place of her soul.
"I can say what is true," the doctor insisted, obstinately. "It'll weigh as heavily, and provoke resentment, bloodshed, and vengeance, because the men have grown different. Do you think that now the mine would march upon the town to save their Senor Administrador? Do you think that?"
(Joseph Conrad, _Nostromo_, Part 3 "The Lighthouse," Chapter 11) ***** -- Yoshie
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