onment, economic dislocation, ethnic
violence, spreading public apathy, the massive increase in crime, and
epidemics that ravage whole populations. However important the application
of legal, sociological or technological expertise to such issues
undoubtedly is, it would be unrealistic to imagine that efforts of this
kind will produce any significant recovery without a fundamental change of
moral consciousness and behaviour.

* * * * *

What the Baha'i world accomplished during those same years acquires an
added brilliancy against the background of this darkened horizon. It is
impossible to exaggerate the significance of the achievement that brought
the Universal House of Justice into existence. For some six thousand years
humanity has experimented with an almost unlimited variety of methods for
collective decision-making. From the vantage point of the twentieth
century, the political history of the world presents a constantly shifting
scene in which there was no possibility that was not seized upon by human
ingenuity. Systems based on principles as different as theocracy,
monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, republic, democracy and near anarchy
have proliferated freely, along with innovations without end that have
sought to combine various desirable features of these possibilities.
Although most of the options have lent themselves to abuses of one kind or
another, the great majority have no doubt contributed in varying degrees
to fulfilling hopes of those whose interests they purportedly served.

During this long evolutionary process, as ever larger and more diverse
populations came under the control of one or another system of government,
the temptation of universal empire repeatedly seized the imaginations of
the Caesars and Napoleons directing such expansion. The resulting series
of calamitous failures that have lent history so much of its ability to
both fascinate and appal, would seem to provide persuasive evidence that
the realization of the ambition lies beyond the reach of any human agency,
no matter how great the resources available to it or how firm its
confidence in the genius of its particular culture.

Yet, the unification of humankind under a system of governance that can
release the full potentialities latent in human nature, and allow their
expression in programmes for the benefit of all, is clearly the next stage
in the evolution of civilization. The physical unification