eseemeth the king of the age to inquire into the condition
of such as have been wronged, and it behooveth him to extend his care to
the weak. Verily, there hath not been, nor is there now, on earth anyone
as oppressed as we are, or as helpless as these wanderers."

It is reported that upon receipt of this first Message that superficial,
tricky, and pride-intoxicated monarch flung down the Tablet saying: "If
this man is God, I am two gods!" The transmitter of the second Tablet had,
it is reliably stated, in order to evade the strict surveillance of the
guards, concealed it in his hat, and was able to deliver it to the French
agent, who resided in Akka, and who, as attested by Nabil in his
Narrative, translated it into French and sent it to the Emperor, he
himself becoming a believer when he had later witnessed the fulfillment of
so remarkable a prophecy.

The significance of the somber and pregnant words uttered by Baha'u'llah
in His second Tablet was soon revealed. He who was actuated in provoking
the Crimean War by his selfish desires, who was prompted by a personal
grudge against the Russian Emperor, who was impatient to tear up the
Treaty of 1815 in order to avenge the disaster of Moscow, and who sought
to shed military glory over his throne, was soon himself engulfed by a
catastrophe that hurled him in the dust, and caused France to sink from
her preeminent station among the nations to that of a fourth power in
Europe.

The Battle of Sedan in 1870 sealed the fate of the French Emperor. The
whole of his army was broken up and surrendered, constituting the greatest
capitulation hitherto recorded in modern history. A crushing indemnity was
exacted. He himself was taken prisoner. His only son, the Prince Imperial,
was killed, a few years later, in the Zulu War. The Empire collapsed, its
program unrealized. The Republic was proclaimed. Paris was subsequently
besieged and capitulated. "The terrible Year" marked by civil war,
exceeding in its ferocity the Franco-German War, followed. William I, the
Prussian king, was proclaimed German Emperor in the very palace which
stood as a "mighty monument and symbol of the power and pride of Louis
XIV, a power which had been secured to some extent by the humiliation of
Germany." Deposed by a disaster "so appalling that it resounded throughout
the world," this false and boastful monarch suffered in the end, and till
his death, the same exile as that which, in the case of Baha'u'llah,