The "inhuman" quiality of the material interests appears again: the San Tomé mountain is more than just powerful, it is "soulless" and "pitiless" to an extent that the worst human institutions could never be. The indictment involves something greater than Nostromo's "taskmasters" -- the Holroyds and Sir Johns of the world, who are after all human. It is aimed at the idea of materialism, which is the worst "autocratic" force because, in the end, it tries to hold human beings to the standard of inanimate material.

On the symbolic level, the San Tomé silver stands for the dream-ideal (indeed, the symbolism is very close to the surface here, with Mrs Gould's meditiations about "the idea"). On this level it is the dream-ideal as such which hangs over "the whole land" (i.e., all the Earth), feared and hated by the ever-exploited people, careless of lives in the "expansion of its greatness," soulless, pitiless and autocratic in its commandeering of a man's life, such as Charles Gould's.