A wildly melodramatic thing to say aloud, that helps set the tone for the high drama to come. Frequently during the night Decoud will make similar references to being glad of the darkness -- the subjectivist revelling in obscurity.

Behind the melodrama, there is a symbolic content to the line that only gradually becomes apparent over the course of the novel. As noted before, the silver stands for the dream-ideal and Costaguana stands for the home of passionate reforming causes. Symbolically, Decoud's action of moving the silver offshore constitutes the attempt by skepticism to remove the dream-ideal from the field of reforming causes -- to take the heart out of the patriotism it despises. The transition becomes even more interesting when the silver ends up on the Great Isabel, which symbolizes the individual, and becomes the property of Nostromo, who represents the People. Conrad thereby illustrates a historical shift in which idealism moves from the mass cause to a modern ideology of individual self-fulfilment via the People's liberation. In this context, Decoud's coded line translates to something like, "Fortunately, mankind is blinded by isolating subjectivity, otherwise (i.e., if there was an objective reference by which mass causes could be justified and sustained), the attempt to rescue idealism from those causes would fail."