Compare "He did not like to be robbed. It exasperated him," which was Charles Gould's summation of his father's suffering. If the parallel is deliberate on Conrad's part, it points to another personal motive behind the Ribierist revolution: Charles' continuing desire to redeem his father's failure.

Note also the artistic smudge here from "power" to "prosperity," concerning the thing in which Charles feels checked. This is subtly psychological: though Charles justifies his goal in terms of national prosperity, he later is willing to sacrifice that by destroying the mine, and the novel suggests that his real motive throughout is "his right," i.e., the exercise of power. The tension between prosperity and power is also allegorical, characterizing the actions of Materialism in the world.