To the letter addressed by Prof. Th. Niemeyer to the editor of The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (see No. 237, 3, 2, of Frankfurter Zeitung) I should like to add the following remarks: During my activity as Professor of the Methodics of Foreign Language Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, (January-June, 1911,) I was introduced to Mr. Andrew Carnegie, with whom I had a long interview. He expressed his views upon the peace question and arbitration, and spoke for a long time about the German Emperor who had repeatedly received him during his visits to Germany. He expressed his great appreciation of the important services rendered by our Emperor for the maintenance of peace, and declared that he, above all others, deserved the title of the Peace-loving Monarch, (Friedensfürst.) To him it was chiefly due that, during the various crises which had repeatedly brought Europe to the brink of war, the disaster had again and again been averted. The German Emperor, he considered, looked upon it as his chief pride that no war should take place during his reign, that Germany should develop and prosper in peaceful emulation with other countries, and his greatest desire was that other nations should recognize ungrudgingly that all Germany did to raise the moral and ethical standard of mankind was for the benefit of all.

If now Carnegie has really declared, as this letter maintains, that he considers the German Emperor the "Disturber of Peace," it shows clearly how baleful the influence of the English press has been—that it could shake such a firm conviction in our Emperor's love of peace. Let us hope that this letter of Prof. Niemeyer's and other explanations to the same effect will induce him to recognize the horrible misrepresentations of English papers and to return to his former conviction.

It was on this occasion, too, that Andrew Carnegie indorsed Prof. Burgess's view, that the three nations—America, Germany, and England—should unite, and then they would be able to keep the peace of the world. When I expressed my doubts in the real friendship of England, he replied, then America and Germany, at least, must hold together to secure universal peace. Hitherto I have refrained from publishing this interview, but now I consider it my duty to make known the views that Carnegie once held, and to which, if he has really changed them, we may hope he, who has done so much in his noble striving after peace, will return right away.

If there should remain the least doubt in Mr. Andrew Carnegie's mind, he has only to read the telegrams exchanged between the Emperor William and the Czar on the one hand, and King George and the Emperor on the other.

1

The English newspaper, The Nation, in which Mr. Shaw's letter to the President of the United States appeared on Nov. 7, made the following comment thereon:

We are glad to publish Mr. Shaw's brilliant appeal to the President of the United States, because we believe that when the time for settlement arrives, the influence of America will be a powerful, perhaps a decisive, factor in obtaining it. We agree, too, with him that while she is not likely to respond to an appeal to intervene on the side of the Entente or the Alliance, the case of Belgium, the innocent victim of the war, is bound to find her in a very different mood. The States are already Belgium's almoner; it is only a step further for them to come in as her savior. But on a vital point we disagree with Mr. Shaw. His Irish mind puts the case with an indifference to which we cannot pretend. We have got to save Western Europe from a victory of Prussian militarism, as well as to avenge Belgium and set her on her feet again. We regard the temper and policy revealed in Germany's violation of Belgium soil and her brutalization of the Belgian people as essential to our judgment of this war and its end. And we dare not concede an inch to Mr. Shaw's "right of way" theory. His distinction between "right of way" and a "right of conquest" has no practical effect other than to extinguish the rights of small nationalities as against great ones, who alone have the power to take a "right of way" when it is refused, and afterward to turn it into a right of conquest. Germany's action was not only a breach of her own treaty (only revealed within a few hours of its execution), but of Article I. of The Hague Convention on the rights of neutral powers:

"THE TERRITORY OF NEUTRAL POWERS IS INVIOLABLE."

It is not therefore a small thing that Germany has ripped clean through the whole fabric of The Hague Conventions of 1907. Could the American Government, aware of that fact, address herself to intervention on the Belgian question without regard to the breaches of international law which were perpetrated, first, through the orignal German invasion of Belgium, and then in the conduct of the campaign in that country?

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