Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

Thus spoke the considerable personage, the millionaire endower of
churches on a scale befitting the greatness of his native
land--the same to whom the doctors used the language of horrid
and veiled menaces. He was a big-limbed, deliberate man, whose
quiet burliness lent to an ample silk-faced frock-coat a
superfine dignity. His hair was iron grey, his eyebrows were
still black, and his massive profile was the profile of a
Caesar's head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German
and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French
blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable
imagination of conquest. He was completely unbending to his
visitor, because of the warm introduction the visitor had brought
from Europe, and because of an irrational liking for earnestness
and determination wherever met, to whatever end directed.

"The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it's
worth--and don't you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is
Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of 10 per cent. loans and
other fool investments. European capital has been flung into it
with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country
know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit
and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to.
But there's no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest
country in the whole of God's Universe. We shall be giving the
word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art,
politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith's
Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up
at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in
hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall
run the world's business whether the world likes it or not. The
world can't help it--and neither can we, I guess."