as an
indispensable preliminary to the formation of the future Commonwealth of
all the nations of the world? Some form of a world super-state must needs
be evolved, in whose favor all the nations of the world will have
willingly ceded every claim to make war, certain rights to impose taxation
and all rights to maintain armaments, except for purposes of maintaining
internal order within their respective dominions. Such a state will have
to include within its orbit an international executive adequate to enforce
supreme and unchallengeable authority on every recalcitrant member of the
commonwealth; a world parliament whose members shall be elected by the
people in their respective countries and whose election shall be confirmed
by their respective governments; and a supreme tribunal whose judgment
will have a binding effect even in such cases where the parties concerned
did not voluntarily agree to submit their case to its consideration. A
world community in which all economic barriers will have been permanently
demolished and the interdependence of Capital and Labor definitely
recognized; in which the clamor of religious fanaticism and strife will
have been forever stilled; in which the flame of racial animosity will
have been finally extinguished; in which a single code of international
law--the product of the considered judgment of the world's federated
representatives--shall have as its sanction the instant and coercive
intervention of the combined forces of the federated units; and finally a
world community in which the fury of a capricious and militant nationalism
will have been transmuted into an abiding consciousness of world
citizenship--such indeed, appears, in its broadest outline, the Order
anticipated by Baha'u'llah, an Order that shall come to be regarded as the
fairest fruit of a slowly maturing age.

"The Tabernacle of Unity," Baha'u'llah proclaims in His message to all
mankind, "has been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers.... Of
one tree are all ye the fruit and of one bough the leaves.... The world is
but one country and mankind its citizens.... Let not a man glory in that
he loves his country; let him rather glory in this, that he loves his
kind."

Unity in Diversity

Let there be no misgivings as to the animating purpose of the world-wide
Law of Baha'u'llah. Far from aiming at the subversion of the existing
foundations of society, it seeks to broaden its basis, to remold its
inst