All the Year Round - General Falcon

This excerpt is from the story printed immediately after “The Moonstone”.   This story appears to be a fictionalized depiction of a gentleman’s visit to Venezuala.  Throughout the narrative, the speaker is fascinated and bemused by the behavior of General Falcon.  The section ends with the narrator noting that he was “pleased with [General Falcon’s] manners, but not too deeply convinced of his sincerity”. The narrator also states that he “was shown a diamond star [General Falcon] wears” and this leads the narrator to cryptically think “so much…for equality, republican simplicity, and all that sort of thing”.  This is a piece of fiction, as well as a rather pointed political opinion about the opulence of foreign leadership.  The narrator is clearly cynical about General Falcon’s effectiveness and slyly insults the diamond star and all that it represents.  Read in this way, the viewers who had just had their minds filled with images of the Moonstone would be led to question the morality of such a jewel.  In this excerpt, the use of fiction to prove a point, as well as the dismissiveness of material wealth seems to insinuate that words, and not money, are the pillars of a successful civilization.