The international government of the world was another idea that sprang simultaneously into the minds of thousands.  The successful realization of this idea was a surprise to many, but as a surprise it was nothing to that received by the mildly protestant sociologists and biologists when irrefutable facts exploded the doctrine of Malthus.  With leisure and joy in the world; with an immensely higher standard of living; and with the enormous spaciousness of opportunity for recreation, development, and pursuit of beauty and nobility and all the higher attributes, the birth-rate fell, and fell astoundingly.  People ceased breeding like cattle.  And better than that, it was immediately noticeable that a higher average of children was being born.  The doctrine of Malthus was knocked into a cocked hat—­or flung to the scrap-heap, as Goliah would have put it.

All that Goliah had predicted that the intelligence of mankind could accomplish with the mechanical energy at its disposal, came to pass.  Human dissatisfaction practically disappeared.  The elderly people were the great grumblers; but when they were honourably pensioned by society, as they passed the age limit for work, the great majority ceased grumbling.  They found themselves better off in their idle old days under the new regime, enjoying vastly more pleasure and comforts than they had in their busy and toilsome youth under the old regime.  The younger generation had easily adapted itself too the changed order, and the very young had never known anything else.  The sum of human happiness had increased enormously.  The world had become gay and sane.  Even the old fogies of professors of sociology, who had opposed with might and main the coming of the new regime, made no complaint.  They were a score of times better remunerated than in the old days, and they were not worked nearly so hard.  Besides, they were busy revising sociology and writing new text-books on the subject.  Here and there, it is true, there were atavisms, men who yearned for the flesh-pots and cannibal-feasts of the old alleged “individualism,” creatures long of teeth and savage of claw who wanted to prey upon their fellow-men; but they were looked upon as diseased, and were treated in hospitals.  A small remnant, however, proved incurable, and was confined in asylums and denied marriage.  Thus there was no progeny to inherit their atavistic tendencies.

As the years went by, Goliah dropped out of the running of the world.  There was nothing for him to run.  The world was running itself, and doing it smoothly and beautifully.  In 1937, Goliah made his long-promised present of Energon to the world.  He himself had devised a thousand ways in which the little giant should do the work of the world—­all of which he made public at the same time.  But instantly the colleges of invention seized upon Energon and utilized it in a hundred thousand additional ways.  In fact, as Goliah confessed in his letter of March 1938,