America Without Colonies: A Talk at the Peace Forum, New York

The International Peace Forum had its meeting on the evening of the twelfth of May, 1912, at the Grace Methodist Episcopal Church on West 104th Street in New York. Pacifists, clergy, journalists, and public reformers had gathered to discuss the slow work of building toward a settled international peace. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá took the floor.

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He opened with a diagnosis the room had not heard from its other speakers. Religion itself was being widely blamed for the world’s hatreds. The Master refused the diagnosis.

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> The foundations of all the divine religions are peace and > agreement, but misunderstandings and ignorance have developed.

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The Founders, He insisted, had not differed. Moses, Christ, Muḥammad — He named them — had been shepherds, sent each to their day, to gather scattered peoples and unite them. The fragmentation in their wake was the fault of those who had inherited the message and made it the property of a single tribe. *Religion,* He said, *should be the cause of love and amity.* Anything else is a misuse of the name.

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He turned then to the audience itself, and to the country in which they lived.

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The European powers, He observed, were now everywhere pursuing empire. Each was suspect at every conference table because each came with colonial holdings and rivalries to defend. America was in a different position. She had no colonies of consequence. She had no record of imperial conquest abroad. She could speak for disarmament and arbitration, the Master proposed, *without suspicion of selfish motives.*

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This, He said, was a spiritual opportunity, not just a diplomatic one. He commended what he had heard of President Taft’s efforts toward arbitration treaties and looked toward the day when representatives of every nation would convene — a body, He suggested, that would surpass even the Hague tribunal in its scope and authority.

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The talk did not turn the wheels of policy that year. But it planted, in the minds of the American peace movement, an idea that would surface again and again across the next century: that the distinctive role of the United States in the family of nations might be, of all things, peace.

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