Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 1. CHAPTER ONE (continued)

Don Jose Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered
Ribiera Government an organizing activity and an eloquence of
which the echoes reached even Europe. For, after the new loan to
the Ribiera Government, Europe had become interested in
Costaguana. The Sala of the Provincial Assembly (in the
Municipal Buildings of Sulaco), with its portraits of the
Liberators on the walls and an old flag of Cortez preserved in a
glass case above the President's chair, had heard all these
speeches--the early one containing the impassioned declaration
"Militarism is the enemy," the famous one of the "trembling
balance" delivered on the occasion of the vote for the raising of
a second Sulaco regiment in the defence of the reforming
Government; and when the provinces again displayed their old
flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento's time) there was another of
those great orations, when Don Jose greeted these old emblems of
the war of Independence, brought out again in the name of new
Ideals. The old idea of Federalism had disappeared. For his part
he did not wish to revive old political doctrines. They were
perishable. They died. But the doctrine of political rectitude
was immortal. The second Sulaco regiment, to whom he was
presenting this flag, was going to show its valour in a contest
for order, peace, progress; for the establishment of national
self-respect without which--he declared with energy--"we are a
reproach and a byword amongst the powers of the world."