idst of
the Great War, in the form of a Revolution which, in the principles it
challenged, the institutions it subverted, and the havoc it wrought, has
scarcely a parallel in modern history.

A great trembling seized and rocked the foundations of that country. The
light of religion was dimmed. Ecclesiastical institutions of every
denomination were swept away. The state religion was disendowed,
persecuted, and abolished. A far-flung empire was dismembered. A militant,
triumphant proletariat exiled the intellectuals, and plundered and
massacred the nobility. Civil war and disease decimated a population,
already in the throes of agony and despair. And, finally, the Chief
Magistrate of a mighty dominion, together with his consort, and his
family, and his dynasty, were swept into the vortex of this great
convulsion, and perished.

The very ordeal that heaped such dire misfortunes on the empire of the
Czars brought about, in its concluding stages, the fall of the almighty
German Kaiser as well as that of the inheritor of the once famed Holy
Roman Empire. It shattered the whole fabric of Imperial Germany, which
arose out of the disaster that engulfed the Napoleonic dynasty, and dealt
the Dual Monarchy its death blow.

Almost half a century before, Baha'u'llah, Who had predicted, in clear and
resounding terms, the ignominious fall of the successor of the great
Napoleon, had, in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, addressed to Kaiser William I, the
newly acclaimed victor, a no less significant warning, and prophesied, in
His apostrophe to the banks of the Rhine, in words equally unambiguous,
the mourning that would afflict the capital of the newly federated empire.

"Do thou remember," Baha'u'llah thus addressed him, "the one [Napoleon]
whose power transcended thy power, and whose station excelled thy
station.... Think deeply, O king, concerning him, and concerning them who,
like unto thee, have conquered cities and ruled over men." And again: "O
banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore, inasmuch as the
swords of retribution were drawn against you; and you shall have another
turn. And We hear the lamentations of Berlin, though she be today in
conspicuous glory."

On him who, in his old age, sustained two attempts upon his life by the
advocates of the rising tide of socialism; on his son Frederick III, whose
three months' reign was overshadowed by mortal disease; and finally on his
grandson, William II, the self-willed and over