on. That inter-governmental debts have imposed a severe
strain on the masses of the people in Europe, have upset the equilibrium
of national budgets, have crippled national industries, and led to an
increase in the number of the unemployed, is no less apparent to an
unprejudiced observer. That the spirit of vindictiveness, of suspicion, of
fear and rivalry, engendered by the war, and which the provisions of the
Peace Treaties have served to perpetuate and foster, has led to an
enormous increase of national competitive armaments, involving during the
last year the aggregate expenditure of no less than a thousand million
pounds, which in turn has accentuated the effects of the world-wide
depression, is a truth that even the most superficial observer will
readily admit. That a narrow and brutal nationalism, which the post-war
theory of self-determination has served to reinforce, has been chiefly
responsible for the policy of high and prohibitive tariffs, so injurious
to the healthy flow of international trade and to the mechanism of
international finance, is a fact which few would venture to dispute.

It would be idle, however, to contend that the war, with all the losses it
involved, the passions it aroused and the grievances it left behind, has
solely been responsible for the unprecedented confusion into which almost
every section of the civilized world is plunged at present. Is it not a
fact--and this is the central idea I desire to emphasize--that the
fundamental cause of this world unrest is attributable, not so much to the
consequences of what must sooner or later come to be regarded as a
transitory dislocation in the affairs of a continually changing world, but
rather to the failure of those into whose hands the immediate destinies of
peoples and nations have been committed, to adjust their system of
economic and political institutions to the imperative needs of a rapidly
evolving age? Are not these intermittent crises that convulse present-day
society due primarily to the lamentable inability of the world's
recognized leaders to read aright the signs of the times, to rid
themselves once for all of their preconceived ideas and fettering creeds,
and to reshape the machinery of their respective governments according to
those standards that are implicit in Baha'u'llah's supreme declaration of
the Oneness of Mankind--the chief and distinguishing feature of the Faith
He proclaimed? For the principle of the Oneness of Manki