If One Member Suffers: 'Abdu'l-Bahá to the Workers of Montreal

‘Abdu’l-Bahá arrived in Montreal at the end of August 1912, the only Canadian stop of His Western journey, and on the third of September He went to Coronation Hall to speak to an audience of socialists and trade-unionists. Strikes were rolling through the industrial cities of North America that year. The room was thick with the conviction that the existing order would have to be torn down before workers could live a decent life.

The Master agreed with the diagnosis. He disagreed with the cure. Mankind has been created from one single origin, He said; thus, in reality, all mankind represents one family. And the family is not held together by the wealthy paying off the poor. It is held together by mutual obligation, recognized at every level of common life.

He pressed the point with a physiological metaphor:

If one member is in distress ... all the other members must necessarily suffer ... if the eye should be affected, that affliction would affect the whole nervous system.

A society, He insisted, is a body. The labourer who cannot feed his children, the orphan with no one to claim her, the elderly worker turned out at the end of his strength — these are not unfortunate others. They are the eye of the social body. If they suffer, the body suffers; the body cannot pretend it does not.

Out of this principle He sketched a system. Each village should have a storehouse, funded by contributions graded to capacity and by the revenue of mineral resources. Out of the storehouse the orphans, the widows, the destitute, the sick, and the elderly should be supported. No one, He said, will remain in need or in want. In factories, profits should be shared with the workers whose labour produced them.

The talk did not call for the destruction of capital. It called for its transformation. The labour leaders who had come to listen heard, perhaps for the first time, a religious teacher describing their cause with their own seriousness — and going further than they had dared.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of September 3, 1912 at Coronation Hall, Montreal. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/