d be so fixed
that if any government later violate any one of its provisions, all the
governments on earth should arise to reduce it to utter submission, nay
the human race as a whole should resolve, with every power at its
disposal, to destroy that government. Should this greatest of all remedies
be applied to the sick body of the world, it will assuredly recover from
its ills and will remain eternally safe and secure."

The holding of this mighty convocation is long overdue.

With all the ardour of our hearts, we appeal to the leaders of all nations
to seize this opportune moment and take irreversible steps to convoke this
world meeting. All the forces of history impel the human race towards this
act which will mark for all time the dawn of its long-awaited maturity.

Will not the United Nations, with the full support of its membership, rise
to the high purposes of such a crowning event?

Let men and women, youth and children everywhere recognize the eternal
merit of this imperative action for all peoples and lift up their voices
in willing assent. Indeed, let it be this generation that inaugurates this
glorious stage in the evolution of social life on the planet.

IV

The source of the optimism we feel is a vision transcending the cessation
of war and the creation of agencies of international co-operation.
Permanent peace among nations is an essential stage, but not, Baha'u'llah
asserts, the ultimate goal of the social development of humanity. Beyond
the initial armistice forced upon the world by the fear of nuclear
holocaust, beyond the political peace reluctantly entered into by
suspicious rival nations, beyond pragmatic arrangements for security and
coexistence, beyond even the many experiments in co-operation which these
steps will make possible lies the crowning goal: the unification of all
the peoples of the world in one universal family.

Disunity is a danger that the nations and peoples of the earth can no
longer endure; the consequences are too terrible to contemplate, too
obvious to require any demonstration. "The well-being of mankind,"
Baha'u'llah wrote more than a century ago, "its peace and security, are
unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established." In
observing that "mankind is groaning, is dying to be led to unity, and to
terminate its age-long martyrdom", Shoghi Effendi further commented that:
"Unification of the whole of mankind is the hall-mark of the stage which