s. Its Secretary of State, addressing at a recent Conference the
assembled representatives of all the American Republics, utters no less
ominous a warning. "These resurgent forces loom threateningly throughout
the world--their ominous shadow falls athwart our own Hemisphere." As to
its Press, the same note of warning and of alarm at an approaching danger
is struck. "We must be prepared to defend ourselves both from within and
without.... Our defensive frontier is long. It reaches from Alaska's Point
Barrow to Cape Horn, and ranges the Atlantic and the Pacific. When or
where Europe's and Asia's aggressors may strike at us no one can say. It
could be anywhere, any time.... We have no option save to go armed
ourselves.... We must mount vigilant guard over the Western Hemisphere."

The distance that the American nation has traveled since its formal and
categoric repudiation of the Wilsonian ideal, the changes that have
unexpectedly overtaken it in recent years, the direction in which world
events are moving, with their inevitable impact on the policies and the
economy of that nation, are to every Baha'i observer, viewing the
developments in the international situation, in the light of the
prophecies of both Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'l-Baha, most significant, and
highly instructive and encouraging. To trace the exact course which, in
these troubled times and pregnant years, this nation will follow would be
impossible. We can only, judging from the direction its affairs are now
taking, anticipate the course she will most likely choose to pursue in her
relationships with both the Republics of America and the countries of the
remaining continents.

A closer association with these Republics, on the one hand, and an
increased participation, in varying degrees, on the other, in the affairs
of the whole world, as a result of recurrent international crises, appear
as the most likely developments which the future has in store for that
country. Delays must inevitably arise, setbacks must be suffered, in the
course of that country's evolution towards its ultimate destiny. Nothing,
however, can alter eventually that course, ordained for it by the unerring
pen of 'Abdu'l-Baha. Its federal unity having already been achieved and
its internal institutions consolidated--a stage that marked its coming of
age as a political entity--its further evolution, as a member of the family
of nations, must, under circumstances that cannot at present be
visu