This is how I interpret Victoria. This is what I think she means. Let me put it to the proof.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A LORD OF INDIA.
I have to tell her one day of the Empire, the power, the stretch of it, the count in millions of miles, in millions of souls; the largest empires, living or dead, mostly but parishes beside hers and mine. In mere size, Russia, even, beaten by an eighth, the Grand Republic beaten all but three times over, the late Darius the Great beaten five times clear—more than forty Germanys, more than fifty Spains! Our own Mother Island but a dot in a waste beside it, Victoria’s Island but a dot on the dot, the parasite of a midge. With this, the figures for commerce, the figures for sails on all the seas that wash the ball, the figures for wealth—a round nine thousand millions sterling, if we were sold up to-morrow, and, for all the bad years since ‘seventy-five, a steady hundred and eighty millions added year by year to the hoard—our swelling liver almost putrid with the gorge of gold.
Victoria is delighted; wants to measure Pitcairn with her sash—is stopped; becomes light of heart, effusive; carolleth; offers to take me to the Cave on the ledge, for a treat—the Cave of the Great Scrape, I have always called it—pays me a sort of reverence, as one who has come from the sun of this colossal system—is stopped again. Then, after purring foolishly over the totals, like a great happy kitten that has got all the thread in the world for a ball, asks to have them unravelled in measured inventory. Is told something about Australia, about Canada, about the Indies. Seems to see it all with ever-dilating pupils, as a child before a pageant of pantomime. Sees it in procession of countless tribes, armies, emblemed industries, brother peoples, subject kings; warriors coated in mail, in crimson, or only in the black of their own skins; priests bearing every symbol, from the notched stick to the cross; mechanics, from them that smooth with the flint hatchet to them that smooth with the Whitworth plane; Nature’s experiments with the type, from the bushman to the man from Mayfair. At this, and long before the procession closes, shows signs of worshipping me again, as a sort of deputy lord of India and the other dependencies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But I turn away.
For modesty forbids, not to speak of the fear of detection. All the lords of India are not so plump; and I sometimes wonder what the lordship means. I am a lord of India, it is true, but so is Snip there, in his sweating-shop, and Swart carrying the sandwich-board, ‘lords of human kind,’ as it was once put; but let us keep within bounds. I think of the lordship whenever I meet Swart, whenever I take stock of all the figures that make the huge stain of shabbiness upon our moving crowds. A lord of India, too, the man in threadbare who turns out every morning from Kentish Town or Somers, or other of the circumjacent wastes, to look for a job in the City, plodding steadily forward for the hundredth time, with fifteen shillings a week as the goal of hope. Clean shaven this lord, got up for ‘respectable appearance,’ down to his last ha’penny, in shining boots, inked for the cracks and patches, and shining coat; everything shining about him, but the hard and hopeless face. He is certainly of the Imperial breed—no one can deny him that—a lord of India, an heir to the ages of struggle and victory on battle plains dotting our fifth of the globe.
But Swart is the best example, and Victoria is easily stimulated to the entreaty that I will tell of him all I know. It is worth telling, in good faith.
‘I first met Swart in Regent Street, a little while before I came out here. He was sandwiched between two boards of “India in London,” and there was something so spiritually picturesque in the ruin of him, from his baggy hat to his mere suggestion of a boot, that it drew me to his side. I was drawn by curiosity rather than by pity, as a naturalist who might want to see how the wood-louse lives.’
‘Where is Regent Street? and what is a sandwich-man?’ said Victoria as I began the tale.
‘We must reserve all that for the footnotes. If I am to keep on moving, you must let me get under way.’
‘Well, we struck up acquaintance, Swart and I. Did I say that he was tallish, thin, bent, and grizzled, and foul? I want to get all that over as soon as may be. Sixty, or thereabouts, I should say, as to age; a not unkindly face, and not unhandsome, but for its furrows and puckers of mean cares—a good face spoiled.’