rtation and all manner of persecution, including death--as already
suffered by the twenty thousand martyrs that have laid down their lives in
the path of its Founders--rather than follow the dictates of a temporal
authority requiring it to renounce its allegiance to its cause.

"If you cut us in pieces, men, women and children alike, in the entire
district of Abadih," was the memorable message sent by the fearless
descendants of some of those martyrs in that turbulent center to the
Governor of Fars, who had intended to coerce them into declaring
themselves as Muslims, "we will never submit to your wishes"--a message
which, as soon as it was delivered to that defiant governor, induced him
to desist from pressing the matter any further.

In the United States of America, the Baha'i community, having already set
an inspiring example, by erecting and perfecting the machinery of its
Administrative Order, was alive to the far-reaching implications of the
sentence passed by the Muslim court in Egypt, and to the significance of
the reaction it had produced in the Holy Land, and was stimulated by the
courageous persistence demonstrated by its sister-community in Persia. It
determined to supplement its notable achievements with further acts
designed to throw into sharper relief the status achieved by the Faith of
Baha'u'llah in the North American continent. It was numerically smaller
than the community of the Persian believers. Owing to the multiplicity of
laws governing the states within the Union, it was faced, in matters
affecting the personal status of its members, with a situation radically
different from that confronting the believers in the East, and much more
complex. But conscious of its responsibility to lend, once again, a
powerful impetus to the unfoldment of a divinely appointed Order, it
boldly undertook to initiate such measures as would accentuate the
independent character of a Revelation it had already so nobly championed.

The recognition of its National Spiritual Assembly by the Federal
authorities as a religious body entitled to hold as trustees properties
dedicated to the interests of the Faith; the establishment of Baha'i
endowments and the exemption obtained for them from the civil authorities
as properties owned by, and administered solely for the benefit of, a
purely religious community, were now to be supplemented by decisions and
measures designed to give further prominence to the nature of the ties
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