The World Set Free

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He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

'And then,' he said…

'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual

struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will

cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of

this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no

eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's

material destiny that opens out before me. I see the desert

continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice,

the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out

among the stars…'

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an

actor or orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,

sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for

dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass

of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the