ing-gear being
repaired, I gave orders to sail for San Francisco."

To say that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy
of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted that blight of
the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavour was a jest, a
monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island, who owned a yacht
and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of
Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The scientists lay
down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered. They did
not know. Military experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty
fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by
a miserable lunatic. It was too much for their sanity. Mere human
reason could not withstand the shock. As the savage is crushed by the
sleight-of-hand of the witch doctor, so was the world crushed by the
magic of Goliah. How did he do it? It was the awful face of the Unknown
upon which the world gazed and by which it was frightened out of the
memory of its proudest achievements.

But all the world was not stunned. There was the invariable
exception--the Island Empire of Japan. Drunken with the wine of success
deep-quaffed, without superstition and without faith in aught but its own
ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with pride of
race, it went forth upon the way of war. America's fleets had been
destroyed. From the battlements of heaven the multitudinous ancestral
shades of Japan leaned down. The opportunity, God-given, had come. The
Mikado was in truth a brother to the gods.

The war-monsters of Japan were loosed in mighty fleets. The Philippines
were gathered in as a child gathers a nosegay. It took longer for the
battleships to travel to Hawaii, to Panama, and to the Pacific Coast.
The United States was panic-stricken, and there arose the powerful party
of dishonourable peace. In the midst of the clamour the _Energon_
arrived in San Francisco Bay and Goliah spoke once more. There was a
little brush as the _Energon_ came in, and a few explosions of magazines
occurred along the war-tunnelled hills as the coast defences went to
smash. Also, the blowing up of the submarine mines in the Golden Gate
made a remarkably fine display. Goliah's message to the people of San
Francisco, dated as usual from Palgrave Island, was published in the
papers. It ran:

"Peace? Peace be with y