bitants, threatens to disorganize the life of the
nation and to bring in its wake afflictions of an even more serious
character. In the Holy Land itself, the heart and nerve-center of the
far-flung and firmly knit community of the followers of Baha'u'llah, and
the repository of its holiest shrines, already gravely disturbed by the
chronic instability of its political life, the religious dissensions of
its inhabitants, and the ten-year-long strain and danger to which its
people have been subjected and exposed, fresh perils are looming on its
horizon, menacing it, on the one hand with the ravages of an epidemic that
has already taken so heavy a toll of the lives of the people beyond its
southern frontier, and threatening it, on the other, with a civil war of
extreme severity and unpredictable in its consequences. Subject to the
same fundamental causes which have deranged the equilibrium of present-day
society and corroded its life are to be regarded the privations, the
restrictions and crisis which, to a lesser degree, are oppressing the
peoples of Central and Southeastern Europe, of the British Isles and of
certain republics of Central and South America.

In all these territories, whether in the Eastern or Western Hemisphere,
the nascent institutions of a struggling Faith, though subjected in
varying degrees to the stress and strain associated with the decline and
dissolution of time-honored institutions, with fratricidal strife,
economic upheavals, financial crises, outbreaks of epidemics and political
revolutions, have thus far, through the interpositions of a merciful
Providence, been graciously enabled to follow their charted course,
undeflected by the cross-currents and the tempestuous winds which must of
necessity increasingly agitate human society ere the hour of its ultimate
redemption approaches.

In contrast to these sorely tried countries on the European, the Asiatic
and the African continents, unlike her sister republics in either Central
or South America, the great republic of the West--the homeland of that
mother community which, fostered through the tender care of an
ever-solicitous Master, has already proved itself capable of rearing in
its turn such splendid progeny among the divers communities of Latin
America, which bids fair to multiply its daughter communities in a
continent of mightier potentialities--such a republic has been, to a
peculiar degree and over a long and uninterrupted period, relatively