g influence of Western culture from Roman times to the present. The England of two thousand years ago, the England to which the Romans came, is compared to the Africa to which Marlow has traveled, and this connection indicates the primitive nature of Africa, setting it up as a pre-civilized place. For Marlow, society is something the individual should bend to in order to maintain the social order:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion of slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . (Conrad 10).
The colonial history of Belgium and the Belgian Congo shows precisely this "idea only."
Clearly, there is a racist component in the "idea only," for that idea is that Europeans have a right to extend their d
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