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The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh
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Pages 188-191
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Breakdown of Political and Economic Structure
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Politically a similar decline, a no less noticeable evidence of
disintegration and confusion, can be discovered in the age we live in--
the age which a future historian might well recognize to have been
the preamble to the Great Age, whose golden days we can as yet but
dimly visualize.
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The passionate and violent happenings that have, in recent years,
strained to almost the point of complete breakdown the political and
economic structure of society are too numerous and complex to
attempt, within the limitations of this general survey, to arrive at
an adequate estimate of their character. Nor have these tribulations,
grievous as they have been, seemed to have reached their climax, and
exerted the full force of their destructive power. The whole world,
wherever and however we survey it, offers us the sad and pitiful
spectacle of a vast, an enfeebled, and moribund organism, which is
being torn politically and strangulated economically by forces it has
ceased to either control or comprehend. The Great Depression, the
aftermath of the severest ordeals humanity had ever experienced, the
disintegration of the Versailles system, the recrudescence of militarism
in its most menacing aspects, the failure of vast experiments
and new-born institutions to safeguard the peace and tranquillity of
peoples, classes and nations, have bitterly disillusioned humanity and
prostrated its spirits. Its hopes are, for the most part, shattered, its
vitality is ebbing, its life strangely disordered, its unity severely
compromised.
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On the continent of Europe inveterate hatreds and increasing
rivalries are once more aligning its ill-fated peoples and nations
into combinations destined to precipitate the most awful and implacable
tribulations that mankind throughout its long record of martyrdom
has suffered. On the North American continent economic distress,
industrial disorganization, widespread discontent at the abortive
experiments designed to readjust an ill-balanced economy, and
restlessness and fear inspired by the possibility of political entanglements
in both Europe and Asia, portend the approach of what may
well prove to be one of the most critical phases of the history of the
American Republic. Asia, still to a great extent in the grip of one of
the severest trials she has, in her recent history, experienced, finds
herself menaced on her eastern confines by the onset of forces that
threaten to intensify the struggles which the growing nationalism
and industrialization of her emancipated races must ultimately engender.
In the heart of Africa, there blazes the fire of an atrocious
and bloody war--a war which, whatever its outcome, is destined
to exert, through its world-wide repercussions, a most disturbing
influence on the races and colored nations of mankind.
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With no less than ten million people under arms, drilled and instructed
in the use of the most abominable engines of destruction
that science has devised; with thrice that number chafing and fretting
at the rule of alien races and governments; with an equally
vast army of embittered citizens impotent to procure for themselves
the material goods and necessities which others are deliberately destroying;
with a still greater mass of human beings groaning under
the burden of ever-mounting armaments, and impoverished by the
virtual collapse of international trade--with evils such as these,
humanity would seem to be definitely entering the outer fringes of
the most agonizing phase of its existence.
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Is it to be wondered at, that in the course of a recent statement
made by one of the outstanding Ministers in Europe this warning
should have been deliberately uttered: "If war should break out
again on a major scale in Europe, it must bring the collapse of
civilization as we know it in its wake. In the words of the late Lord
Bryce, `If you don't end war, war will end you.'" "Poor Europe is
in a state of neurasthenia...", is the testimony of one of the
most outstanding figures among its present-day dictators. "It has
lost its recuperative power, the vital force of cohesion, of synthesis.
Another war would destroy us." "It is likely," writes one of the
most eminent and learned dignitaries of the Christian Church,
"there will have to be one more great conflict in Europe to definitely
establish once and for all an international authority. This conflict
will be the most horrible of horribles, and possibly this generation
will be called on to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives."
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The disastrous failure of both the Disarmament and Economic
Conferences; the obstacles confronting the negotiations for the limitation
of Naval armaments; the withdrawal of two of the most
powerful and heavily armed nations of the world from the activities
and membership of the League of Nations; the ineptitude of the
parliamentary system of government as witnessed by recent developments
in Europe and America; the inability of the leaders and
exponents of the Communist movement to vindicate the much-vaunted
principle of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; the perils
and privations to which the rulers of the Totalitarian states have, in
recent years, exposed their subjects--all these demonstrate, beyond
the shadow of a doubt, the impotence of present-day institutions to
avert the calamities with which human society is being increasingly
threatened. What else remains, a bewildered generation may well
ask, that can repair the cleavage that is constantly widening, and
which may, at any time, engulf it?
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Beset on every side by the cumulative evidences of disintegration,
of turmoil and of bankruptcy, serious-minded men and women,
in almost every walk of life, are beginning to doubt whether society,
as it is now organized, can, through its unaided efforts, extricate
itself from the slough into which it is steadily sinking. Every system,
short of the unification of the human race, has been tried,
repeatedly tried, and been found wanting. Wars again and again
have been fought, and conferences without number have met and
deliberated. Treaties, pacts and covenants have been painstakingly
negotiated, concluded and revised. Systems of government have
been patiently tested, have been continually recast and superseded.
Economic plans of reconstruction have been carefully devised, and
meticulously executed. And yet crisis has succeeded crisis, and the
rapidity with which a perilously unstable world is declining has been
correspondingly accelerated. A yawning gulf threatens to involve in
one common disaster both the satisfied and dissatisfied nations, democracies
and dictatorships, capitalists and wage-earners, Europeans
and Asiatics, Jew and Gentile, white and colored. An angry Providence,
the cynic might well observe, has abandoned a hapless planet
to its fate, and fixed irrevocably its doom. Sore-tried and disillusioned,
humanity has no doubt lost its orientation, and would seem
to have lost as well its faith and hope. It is hovering, unshepherded
and visionless, on the brink of disaster. A sense of fatality seems
to pervade it. An ever-deepening gloom is settling on its fortunes as
she recedes further and further from the outer fringes of the darkest
zone of its agitated life and penetrates its very heart.
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And yet while the shadows are continually deepening, might we
not claim that gleams of hope, flashing intermittently on the international
horizon, appear at times to relieve the darkness that encircles
humanity? Would it be untrue to maintain that in a world of
unsettled faith and disturbed thought, a world of steadily mounting
armaments, of unquenchable hatreds and rivalries, the progress,
however fitful, of the forces working in harmony with the spirit of
the age can already be discerned? Though the great outcry raised by
post-war nationalism is growing louder and more insistent every
day, the League of Nations is as yet in its embryonic state, and the
storm clouds that are gathering may for a time totally eclipse its
powers and obliterate its machinery, yet the direction in which the
institution itself is operating is most significant. The voices that
have been raised ever since its inception, the efforts that have been
exerted, the work that has already been accomplished, foreshadow
the triumphs which this presently constituted institution, or any
other body that may supersede it, is destined to achieve.
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