mission of the Baha'i
community in the North American continent; the second, with the destiny of
the United States as a nation. Speaking of this latter phenomenon, which
dated back to the outbreak of the first world war, Shoghi Effendi writes:

It received its initial impetus through the formulation of President
Wilson's Fourteen Points, closely associating for the first time that
republic with the fortunes of the Old World. It suffered its first setback
through the dissociation of that republic from the newly born League of
Nations which that president had labored to create.... It must, however
long and tortuous the way, lead, through a series of victories and
reverses, to the political unification of the Eastern and Western
Hemispheres, to the emergence of a world government and the establishment
of the Lesser Peace, as foretold by Baha'u'llah and foreshadowed by the
Prophet Isaiah. It must, in the end, culminate in the unfurling of the
banner of the Most Great Peace, in the Golden Age of the Dispensation of
Baha'u'llah.(41)

How tragic, therefore, was the fate of the conception that had inspired
the efforts of the American president. As soon became apparent, the League
had been stillborn. Although it included such features as a legislature, a
judiciary, an executive, and a supporting bureaucracy, it had been denied
the authority vital to the work it was ostensibly intended to perform.
Locked into the nineteenth century's conception of untrammelled national
sovereignty, it could take decisions only with the unanimous assent of the
member states, a requirement largely ruling out effective action.(42) The
hollowness of the system was exposed, as well, by its failure to include
some of the world's most powerful states: Germany had been rejected as a
defeated nation held responsible for the war, Russia was initially denied
entrance because of its Bolshevik regime, and the United States itself
refused--as a result of narrow political partisanship in Congress--either to
join the League or to ratify the treaty. Ironically, even the half-hearted
efforts made to protect ethnic minorities living in the newly created
nation-states proved eventually to be little more than weapons to be used
in Europe's continuing fratricidal conflicts.

In sum, at precisely the moment in human history when an unprecedented
outbreak of violence had undermined the inherited bulwarks of civilized
behaviour, the political leadership of the Western w