Mr Harbury suggested that they should read the draft of the prospectus immediately, and that if anything occurred to any of them for the last time he should mention it.
Mr Harbury had not got very far into the body of the work when Lord Benthorpe stopped him at the word “exploitation.” It seemed to him a foreign word, and it had a flavour of something grasping and unjust about it. He hoped that no atmosphere of that kind would mar the effect of the prospectus.
Mr Harbury was evidently interested, and asked Mr Burden’s opinion. Mr Burden, who had been lost in thought, gazing at the great map of the M’Korio Delta that hung on the wall, patched with yellow for gold and with grey for coal, looked round somewhat flurried, and said that he had nothing to say.
Lord Benthorpe suggested the word “development,” but Mr Harbury pointed out that the word already occurred at the head of the sheet in the phrase “M’Korio Delta Development Company.”
Lord Benthorpe murmured:
“True, true.”
After about ten minutes of discussion, the word “exploitation” was allowed to stand.
Such are the limits of a modern book, that it is impossible for me to give at full length every remark that was made during this historic meeting. I abandon the attempt with reluctance. So many subtle shades of meaning were thrashed out between these four men; so powerfully did their various characters come into play; so many aspects of the forces that build up new colonies appeared in them, that the subject possesses an irresistible fascination to the writer, and perhaps to the reader of this chronicle. It is a fascination which they must resist: each in his own sphere.
Briefly, then, to mention only the more important matters, the word “but” in the fifth line was changed to “and”; the Anglo-Saxon word “employee” was substituted for the printer’s “employé”; and (a very striking example of Mr Barnett’s grasp of the public pulse), the word “lagoon” (though it had become familiar to the Island race in the last two months) was changed to “lake.”