In 1864 the Fathers of Confederation met at Quebec, while the Germans took from the Danes the neck of land through which they cut the Kiel Canal to give the German Navy a safe back way between the North Sea and the Baltic. At first sight you cannot understand why Canadian Confederation and the German attack on Denmark should ever be mentioned together. But, just as the waters of two streams in the same river system are bound to meet in the end, so Canada and Germany were bound to meet on the same battlefield when once Canada had begun to grow into a nation within the British Empire and Germany had begun to grow into an empire for whose ambitions there was no room without a series of victorious wars. After beating Austria in 1866, to win the leadership of Central Europe, Germany beat France in 1870, took Alsace and Lorraine, and made herself the strongest land-power in the world. Even then two such very different Englishmen as Cardinal Newman and John Stuart Mill foresaw the clash that was bound to come between the new empire of the Germans and the old one of the British. But most people never see far ahead, while many will not look at all if the prospect seems to be unpleasant. Thirty years before the war (1884) Germany began to get an empire overseas. Taking every possible chance she went on till she had a million square miles and fifteen million natives. But she neither had nor could get without victorious war any land outside of Germany where she could bring up German children under the German flag. Even including the German parts of Austria there was barely one quarter-million of square miles on which German-speaking people could go on growing under their own flags; while the English-speaking people of the British Empire and the United States had twenty times as much land, fit for whites, on which to grow bigger and bigger populations of their own blood under their own flags. This meant that the new, strong, and most ambitious German Empire was doomed to an ever-dwindling future as a world-power in comparison with the British Empire. The Germans could not see why they should not have as good a "place in the sun" of the white man's countries as the British, whom they now looked on very much as our ancestors looked upon the oversea Spaniards about the time of the Armada. "Why," they asked, "should the British have so much white man's country while we have so little?"