Note 5 — Chapter XXIV · Dreams
Charles E. (Charles Edward) Derbyshire translation
There is something almost uncanny about the general accuracy of the prophecy in these lines, the economic part of which is now so well on the way to realization, although the writer of them would doubtless have been a very much surprised individual had he also foreseen how it would come about. But one of his own expressions was “fire and steel to the cancer,” and it surely got them.
On the very day that this passage was translated and this note written, the first commercial liner was tied up at the new docks, which have destroyed the Malecon but raised Manila to the front rank of Oriental seaports, and the final revision is made at Baguio, Mountain Province, amid the “cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains.” As for the political portion, it is difficult even now to contemplate calmly the blundering fatuity of that bigoted medieval brand of “patriotism” which led the decrepit Philippine government to play the Ancient Mariner and shoot the Albatross that brought this message.—Tr. ↑