nore
them. It would be no exaggeration to say that these colossal achievements,
with the amazing results which flowed from them, could only have been
effected through the harnessing of all the agencies of a newly established
Administrative Order, operating in conformity with a carefully conceived
Plan, and that they constitute a befitting conclusion to the record of a
hundred years of sublime endeavor in the service of the Cause of
Baha'u'llah.

That the community of His followers in the United States and Canada should
have carried off the palm of victory in the concluding years of such a
glorious century is not a matter for surprise. Its accomplishments during
the last two decades of the Heroic, and throughout the first fifteen years
of the Formative Age of the Baha'i Dispensation, had already augured well
for its future, and had paved the way for its final victory ere the
expiration of the first century of the Baha'i Era.

The Bab had in His Qayyumu'l-Asma, almost a hundred years previously,
sounded His specific summons to the "peoples of the West" to "issue forth"
from their "cities" and aid His Cause. Baha'u'llah, in His Kitab-i-Aqdas,
had collectively addressed the Presidents of the Republics of the entire
Americas, bidding them arise and "bind with the hands of justice the
broken," and "crush the oppressor" with the "rod of the commandments" of
their Lord, and had, moreover, anticipated in His writings the appearance
"in the West" of the "signs of His Dominion." 'Abdu'l-Baha had, on His
part, declared that the "illumination" shed by His Father's Revelation
upon the West would acquire an "extraordinary brilliancy," and that the
"light of the Kingdom" would "shed a still greater illumination upon the
West" than upon the East. He had extolled the American continent in
particular as "the land wherein the splendors of His Light shall be
revealed, where the mysteries of His Faith shall be unveiled," and
affirmed that "it will lead all nations spiritually." More specifically
still, He had singled out the Great Republic of the West, the leading
nation of that continent, declaring that its people were "indeed worthy of
being the first to build the Tabernacle of the Most Great Peace and
proclaim the oneness of mankind," that it was "equipped and empowered to
accomplish that which will adorn the pages of history, to become the envy
of the world, and be blest in both the East and the West."

The first act of His ministry ha