ent efforts we exert,
can prove ourselves the determining factor in the immediate fortunes of
the society we live in? As we witness on all sides the growing
restlessness of a restless age, we are filled with mixed feelings of fear
and hope--fear, at the prospect of yet another deadly encounter, the
inevitability of which is alas! becoming increasingly manifest; hope, in
the serene assurance that whatever cataclysm may yet visit humanity, it
cannot but hasten the approaching era of universal and lasting peace so
emphatically proclaimed by the Pen of Baha'u'llah. In the political
domain, where we have lately witnessed, in the council of the leading
nations of the world, the surrender of humanity's noblest conception to
what may be regarded only as a transient phase in the life of peoples and
nations; in the industrial world, where the representatives of the
wage-earning classes, either through violence or persuasion, are capturing
the seats of authority and wielding the scepter of power: in the field of
religion, where we have lately witnessed widespread and organized attempts
to broaden and simplify the basis of man's faith, to achieve unity in
Christendom and restore the regenerating vigor of Islam; in the heart of
society itself, where the ominous signs of increasing extravagance and
profligacy are but lending fresh impetus to the forces of revolt and
reaction that are growing more distinct every day--in these as in many
others we have much cause for alarm, but much to be hopeful and thankful
for also. To take but one instance more fully: Observe the fierce and as
yet unsilenced dispute which the proposal for the introduction of a
binding and universal pact of non-aggression among the nations of Europe
has aroused among the avowed supporters of the League of Nations--a League
so auspiciously welcomed for the ideal that prompted its birth, yet now so
utterly inadequate in the actual principles that underlie its present-day
structure and working. And yet, in the great outcry raised by post-war
nationalism in blindly defending and upholding the unfettered supremacy of
its own sovereignty, and in repudiating unreservedly the conception of a
world super-state, can we not discern the re-enactment only on a larger
scale of the dramatic struggles that heralded the birth of the
reconstructed and unified nations of the West? Has not authentic history
clearly revealed in the case of these nations the painful yet inevitable
merging