The Island by Richard Whiteing — Read

I have to tell her one day of the Empire, the power, the stretch of it, the count in millions of miles, in millions of souls; the largest empires, living or dead, mostly but parishes beside hers and mine. In mere size, Russia, even, beaten by an eighth, the Grand Republic beaten all but three times over, the late Darius the Great beaten five times clear -- more than forty Germanys, more than fifty Spains! Our own Mother Island but a dot in a waste beside it, Victoria's Island but a dot on the dot, the parasite of a midge. With this, the figures for commerce, the figures for sails on all the seas that wash the ball, the figures for wealth -- a round nine thousand millions sterling, if we were sold up to-morrow, and, for all the bad years since ‘seventy-five, a steady hundred and eighty millions added year by year to the hoard -- our swelling liver almost putrid with the gorge of gold.

Victoria is delighted; wants to measure Pitcairn with her sash -- is stopped; becomes light of heart, effusive; carolleth; offers to take me to the Cave on the ledge, for a treat -- the Cave of the Great Scrape, I have always called it -- pays me a sort of reverence, as one who has come from the sun of this colossal system -- is stopped again. Then, after purring foolishly over the totals, like a great happy kitten that has got all the thread in the world for a ball, asks to have them unravelled in measured inventory. Is told something about Australia, about Canada, about the Indies. Seems to see it all with ever-dilating pupils, as a child before a pageant of pantomime. Sees it in procession of countless tribes, armies, emblemed industries, brother peoples, subject kings; warriors coated in mail, in crimson, or only in the black of their own skins; priests bearing every symbol, from the notched stick to the cross; mechanics, from them that smooth with the flint hatchet to them that smooth with the Whitworth plane; Nature's experiments with the type, from the bushman to the man from Mayfair. At this, and long before the procession closes, shows signs of worshipping me again, as a sort of deputy lord of India and the other dependencies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But I turn away.