other, more subtle pressures on
the prevailing order. Large-scale industrial production, fuelled by the
arms race, had accelerated the movement of populations into urban centres.
By the end of the preceding century, this process was already undermining
inherited standards and loyalties, exposing growing numbers of people to
novel ideas for the bringing about of social change, and exciting mass
appetites for material benefits previously available only to elite
segments of society. Even under relatively autocratic systems, the public
was beginning to perceive the extent to which civil authority was
dependent for its effectiveness on its ability to win broad popular
support. These social developments would have unforeseen and far-reaching
consequences. As war would drag endlessly on and unthinking faith in its
simplicities come into question, millions of men in conscript armies on
both sides would begin to see their sufferings as meaningless in
themselves and fruitless in terms of their own and their families'
well-being.

Beyond these implications of technological and economic change, scientific
advancement seemed to encourage easy assumptions about human nature, the
almost unnoticed overlay that Baha'u'llah has termed "the obscuring dust
of all acquired knowledge".(36) These unexamined views communicated
themselves to ever-widening audiences. Sensationalism in the popular
press, fiery debates between scientists or scholars, on the one hand, and
theologians or influential clergymen, on the other, along with the rapid
spread of public education, continued to undermine the authority of
accepted religious doctrines, as well as of prevailing moral standards.

These seismic forces of the new century combined to make the situation
facing the Western world in 1914 intensely volatile. When the great
conflagration did break out, therefore, the nightmare far surpassed the
worst fears of thoughtful minds. It would serve no purpose here to review
the exhaustively analyzed cataclysm of World War I. The statistics
themselves remain almost beyond the ability of the human mind to
encompass: an estimated sixty million men eventually being thrown into the
most horrific inferno that history had ever known, eight million of them
perishing in the course of the war and an additional ten million or more
being permanently disabled by crippling injuries, burned-out lungs and
appalling disfigurements.(37) Historians have suggested that the total