The Separatist image mirrors the Occidental Republic about to be born. Conrad's symbolism steps to the foreground here; the silver of San Tomé is explicitly "the emblem of a common cause," i.e., a unifying dream ideal. But the passage is laced with irony, highlighted by the phrases "as if" and "had been," for if the reader knows anything by now, it is that no common cause exists within Ribierism (or any united ideal); there is nothing but a congeries of divergent individual motives, seen here on the brink of finally splintering apart.

Note also the irony in the invocation of the material interests, at the very moment when the material itself (the silver) is being shoved into the abyss. Once again the novel shows that the so-called material interests are first and foremost a dream-ideal, whose principals willingly sacrifice their object of desire to preserve the intangibles of their cause.