r, Alexander III, paved the way for a
revolution which, in the reign of Nicholas II, swept away on a bloody tide
the empire of the Czars, brought in its wake war, disease and famine, and
established a militant proletariat which massacred the nobility,
persecuted the clergy, drove away the intellectuals, disendowed the state
religion, executed the Czar with his consort and his family, and
extinguished the dynasty of the Romanoffs.

Pope Pius IX, the undisputed head of the most powerful Church in
Christendom, who had been commanded, in an Epistle addressed to him by
Baha'u'llah, to leave his "palaces unto such as desire them," to "sell all
the embellished ornaments" in his possession, to "expend them in the path
of God," and hasten towards "the Kingdom," was compelled to surrender, in
distressing circumstances, to the besieging forces of King Victor
Emmanuel, and to submit himself to be depossessed of the Papal States and
of Rome itself. The loss of "the Eternal City," over which the Papal flag
had flown for one thousand years, and the humiliation of the religious
orders under his jurisdiction, added mental anguish to his physical
infirmities and embittered the last years of his life. The formal
recognition of the Kingdom of Italy subsequently exacted from one of his
successors in the Vatican, confirmed the virtual extinction of the Pope's
temporal sovereignty.

But the rapid dissolution of the Ottoman, the Napoleonic, the German, the
Austrian and the Russian empires, the demise of the Qajar dynasty and the
virtual extinction of the temporal sovereignty of the Roman Pontiff do not
exhaust the story of the catastrophes that befell the monarchies of the
world through the neglect of Baha'u'llah's warnings conveyed in the
opening passages of His Suriy-i-Muluk. The conversion of the Portuguese
and Spanish monarchies, as well as the Chinese empire, into republics; the
strange fate that has, more recently, been pursuing the sovereigns of
Holland, of Norway, of Greece, of Yugoslavia and of Albania now living in
exile; the virtual abdication of the authority exercised by the kings of
Denmark, of Belgium, of Bulgaria, of Rumania and of Italy; the
apprehension with which their fellow sovereigns must be viewing the
convulsions that have seized so many thrones; the shame and acts of
violence which, in some instances, have darkened the annals of the reigns
of certain monarchs in both the East and the West, and still more recently
the