he West
arose, in the full strength of their solidarity, to promote, more
vigorously than ever before, the international expansion of their Faith,
an expansion which was now to assume such proportions as to deserve to be
recognized as one of the most significant developments in the history of
the first Baha'i century.

Launched in every continent of the globe, at first intermittent,
haphazard, and unorganized, and later, as a result of the emergence of a
slowly developing Administrative Order, systematically conducted,
centrally directed and efficiently prosecuted, the teaching enterprises
which were undertaken by the followers of Baha'u'llah in many lands, but
conspicuously in America, and which were pursued by members of all ages
and of both sexes, by neophytes and by veterans, by itinerant teachers and
by settlers, constitute, by virtue of their range and the blessings which
have flowed from them, a shining episode that yields place to none except
those associated with the exploits which have immortalized the early years
of the primitive age of the Baha'i Dispensation.

The light of the Faith which during the nine years of the Babi
Dispensation had irradiated Persia, and been reflected on the adjoining
territory of 'Iraq; which in the course of Baha'u'llah's thirty-nine-year
ministry had shed its splendor upon India, Egypt, Turkey, the Caucasus,
Turkistan, the Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Burma, and which had
subsequently, through the impulse of a divinely-instituted Covenant,
traveled to the United States of America, Canada, France, Great Britain,
Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, Arabia,
Tunisia, China, Japan, the Hawaiian Islands, South Africa, Brazil and
Australia, was now to be carried to, and illuminate, ere the termination
of the first Baha'i century, no less than thirty-four independent nations,
as well as several dependencies situated in the American, the Asiatic and
African continents, in the Persian Gulf, and in the Atlantic and the
Pacific oceans. In Norway, in Sweden, in Denmark, in Belgium, in Finland,
in Ireland, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Rumania, in Yugoslavia, in
Bulgaria, in Albania, in Afghanistan, in Abyssinia, in New Zealand and in
nineteen Latin American Republics ensigns of the Revelation of Baha'u'llah
have been raised since 'Abdu'l-Baha's passing, and the structural basis of
the Administrative Order of His Faith, in many of them, already
establish