The races,
nations and classes included within its orbit are numerous and highly
diversified, and the prizes to be won by its victors incalculably great.
The hatreds that inflame, the rivalries that agitate, the controversies
that confuse, the miseries that afflict, these races, nations and classes
are bitter and of long standing. The influence and fanaticism, whether
ecclesiastical or political, of potentially hostile organizations, firmly
entrenched within their ancestral strongholds, are formidable.

The members of the North American Baha'i Community, to whose care the
immediate destinies of this fate-laden crusade have been entrusted, are
standing at a new crossroads. Behind them is an imperishable record, brief
yet illustrious, of feats performed over the entire range of the Western
Hemisphere. Before them stretches a vista alluring in its as yet hazy
outlines, entrancing in its magnitude, reaching to the far horizons of as
yet unconquered territories. They can look back, since that crusade was
launched, upon a decade of modest beginnings, of toilsome labors, of
richly deserved rewards. They now look forward to successive epochs
reaching as far as the fringes of that Golden Age that is to be, glowing
in the light of God-given promises, destined to be traversed at the cost
of infinite toil and of heroic self-sacrifice.

They can neither retrace their steps, nor falter, nor even afford to mark
time. The sands are running out, the short span of six brief years
intervening between the present hour and the termination of the second
stage of the enterprise on which they have embarked will soon expire. The
hosts on high, having sounded the signal, are impatient to rush forward,
and demonstrate anew the irresistible force of their might. Europe, in the
throes of the aftermath of a horribly devastating conflict, calls
desperately, in one of the darkest hours of its history, for that
sovereign remedy which only the Plan, conceived by a divinely appointed
Physician, can administer. Sister communities, in the north and in the
heart of that continent, alive to the needs, the opportunities and the
glorious mission of the vanguard of Baha'u'llah's crusaders, now landing
on the shores of that agitated continent, are only too eager to reinforce
the stupendous exertions that must needs be made for its ultimate
redemption. Nor will other sister communities further afield refrain, for
a moment, from lending a helping hand, once the pr