days later.
What Shoghi Effendi has called "His historic journeys" ended with His
return to Haifa on 5 December 1913.

* * * * *

Two years, almost to the day, after 'Abdu'l-Baha's statement to the editor
of the _Montreal Daily Star_, the world that had enjoyed so intoxicating a
sense of self-confidence and whose foundations had appeared impregnable,
collapsed abruptly. The catastrophe is popularly associated with the
murder in Sarajevo of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian
empire, and certainly the train of blunders, reckless threats and mindless
appeals to "honour" that led directly to World War I was ignited by this
relatively minor event. In reality, however, as the Master had pointed
out, preliminary "rumblings" during the entire first decade of the century
should have alerted European leaders to the fragility of the existing
order.

In the years 1904-1905, the Japanese and Russian empires had gone to war
with a violence that led to the destruction of virtually the entire naval
forces of the latter power and its surrender of territories it regarded as
vital to its interests, a humiliation that was to have long-lasting
domestic and international repercussions. On two occasions during these
opening years of the century, war between France and Germany over
imperialist designs in North Africa was narrowly averted only through the
self-interested intervention of other powers. In 1911 Italian ambitions
similarly provoked a dangerous threat to international peace by the
seizure from the Ottoman empire of what is now Libya. International
instability had been further deepened-- as the Master had also warned--when
Germany, feeling constrained by a growing web of hostile alliances,
embarked on a massive naval building programme aimed at eliminating the
previously accepted British lead.

Exacerbating these conflicts were tensions among the subject peoples of
the Romanov, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Waiting only for some turn of
events that would break the grip of the ramshackle systems that suppressed
them, Balts, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Albanians, Bulgars, Romanians,
Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, and a host of other nationalities looked forward
eagerly to their day of liberation. Tirelessly exploiting this network of
fissures in the existing order were a multitude of conspiracies,
resistance groups and separatist organizations. Inspired by ideologies
ranging from an almost i