so elaborately reared through a policy of blood and
iron, crashing to the ground. All the efforts to that end, which through
internal legislation and foreign wars had, ever since the accession of
William I to the Prussian throne, been assiduously exerted, came to
naught. "The lamentations of Berlin," tortured by the terms of a treaty
monstrous in its severity, were raised, contrasting with the hilarious
shouts of victory that rang, half a century before, in the Hall of Mirrors
of the Palace of Versailles.

The Hapsburg monarch, heir of centuries of glorious history,
simultaneously toppled from his throne. It was Francis Joseph, whom
Baha'u'llah chided in the Kitab-i-Aqdas for having failed in his duty to
investigate His Cause, let alone to seek His presence, when so easily
accessible to him in the course of his visit to the Holy Land. "Thou
passed Him by," He thus reproves the pilgrim-emperor, "and inquired not
about Him.... We have been with thee at all times, and found thee clinging
unto the Branch and heedless of the Root.... Open thine eyes, that thou
mayest behold this Glorious Vision and recognize Him Whom thou invokest in
the daytime and in the night season, and gaze on the Light that shineth
above this luminous Horizon."

The House of Hapsburg, in which the Imperial Title had remained
practically hereditary for almost five centuries, was, ever since those
words were uttered, being increasingly menaced by the forces of internal
disintegration, and was sowing the seeds of an external conflict, to both
of which it ultimately succumbed. Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, King
of Hungary, a reactionary ruler, reestablished old abuses, ignored the
rights of nationalities, and restored that bureaucratic centralization
that proved in the end so injurious to his empire. Repeated tragedies
darkened his reign. His brother Maximilian was shot in Mexico. The Crown
Prince Rudolph perished in a dishonorable affair. The Empress was
assassinated in Geneva. Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife were
murdered in Sarajevo, kindling a war in the midst of which the Emperor
himself died, closing a reign which is unsurpassed by any other reign in
the disasters it brought to the nation.

END OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Belated efforts had been made to steady his tottering throne. The
"ramshackle empire," a medley of states, races, and languages, was,
however, relentlessly and rapidly disintegrating. The political and
eco