about using political will and power to achieve his vision. For example, in 1872, a Board of Arbitration was convened in Switzerland to settle a dispute between the United States and Britain over losses of merchant ships during the American Civil War. During the deliberations, Monk wrote to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant, urging that this board be made permanent and set up in Jerusalem. Monk also thought that a powerful sponsor nation could unilaterally achieve his goals, and he placed his greatest hopes for such a sponsor nation in Great Britain. He believed that Anglophone nations were the most advanced in the world, and, as the leading nation of the leading group of nations, Great Britain was best suited to aid in the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. Moralist aspects A good number of the pleas Monk made on behalf of world Jewry were on strictly moral and humanitarian grounds. In some cases, he merely pointed out the poverty so many European Jews lived in, the antisemitism they had to endure on a daily basis, and the general injustices visited upon them in their countries of residence. He came to the conclusion that the only way to alleviate their suffering was to return them to the Holy Land. He also invoked moral responsibility, suggesting many times that in restoring the Jews to Palestine, the nations of Europe and North America would be atoning for all the injustices they had perpetrated on the Jewish people over the centuries. Since Monk believed the international tribunal he envisioned would end war and conflict, the moralist element of such an idea hardly needs explanation. Similar to some of his Zionist arguments, he emphasized that the world's leading nations needed to take the responsibility of creating such a body, to save mankind from itself. Notable achievements Monk was never particularly successful in his life's work. He received scant attention from the politicians he lobbied, and had little impact on the growing Zionist movement in Europe and North America. His writings were not widely distributed, though some were translated into Hebrew and printed in the periodical Hamagid, based in Lyck, in what was then Prussia. As early as the 1870s, Monk wrote of the need for a modern port in Haifa and large-scale land reclamation if Palestine were to be settled by large numbers of Jews. Both these assertions proved true, and