In return he asked the ex-president to mediate the growing conflict between the two cousins who ruled Britain and Germany. Roosevelt started to do so but the scheme collapsed when king Edward VII suddenly died.[389][390] Nasaw argues that Roosevelt systematically deceived and manipulated Carnegie, and held the elderly man in contempt. Nasaw quotes a private letter Roosevelt wrote to Whitelaw Reid in 1905:[391] [I have] tried hard to like Carnegie, but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for the one who makes a God of mere money-making and at the same time is always yelling out that kind of utterly stupid condemnation of war which in almost every case springs from a combination of defective physical courage, of unmanly shrinking from pain and effort, and of hopelessly twisted ideals. All the suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works, and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune....It is as noxious folly to denounce war per se as it is to denounce business per se. 