ny possibility of
protecting ourselves against this "beast of the pit." Do not believe the
lies, and spread abroad the truth about us. We are today no different
than Carlyle pictured us to you. HARNACK.

*The Causes of the War*

*By Theodore Niemeyer*

_Theodore Niemeyer, Kaiser Wilhelm Exchange Professor at Columbia
University for 1914-15, and well-known Professor of Kiel
University, has addressed the following letter to the editor of The
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung._

KIEL, 14th August, 1914.

_To the Editor of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung_:

Dear Sir: English papers publish a telegram from Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in
which the view is expressed that the German Emperor, "in declining to
take part In the peace conference proposed by Sir Edward Grey, an
advocate of peace," proved unfaithful to that love of peace which he has
shown during the past twenty-five years--that he, on the contrary, has
taken up the role of a disturber of the peace of Europe.

To the best of my knowledge, the German press has only referred to this
telegram with the simple remark that intelligence of the real state of
affairs has evidently not yet reached the ears of the sender of the
telegram.

This attitude of the German press is in conformity with its firm
consciousness of the justice of its cause and its confidence in the
ultimate triumph of truth. Both in this consciousness and in this
confidence I will not be surpassed by any one, but to observe silence in
the face of such accusations is beyond my power. To allow such a
misconstruction to pass unchallenged through the world seems to me (and
doubtless to many thousands besides me) unbearable.

The misunderstanding about the Peace Conference is easily put right. Sir
Edward Grey did not propose any peace conference at all, but a
conference of the Ambassadors of those four powers which were at that
time not directly concerned, namely Germany, England, France, and Italy.
These powers were to attempt to exert their influence on Austria-Hungary
and Russia in the same way as the Ambassador's Conference (or rather
Ambassadorial Reunion) in London had done, in 1912 and 1913, on the
Balkan States and Turkey. What the united six powers at that time
undertook toward the Balkan States was now to be done by
four--discordant--powers upon two others who are in a state of highest
political tension. To this proposal Germany replied that the apparatus
of an Ambassadorial Conf