Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


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."

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