Lift up your hearts above the present and look with eyes of faith into the future! Today the seed is sown, the grain falls upon the earth, but behold the day will come when it shall rise a glorious tree and the branches thereof shall be laden with fruit. Rejoice and be glad that this day has dawned, try to realize its power, for it is indeed wonderful!(34)
On the morning of 13 June 1913, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá embarked at Marseilles on the steamer _S. S. Himalaya, _arriving at Port Said in Egypt four 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-Bahá’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.