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Title: Thomas D'Arcy McGee

Author: Alexander Brady

Editor: W. Stewart Wallace

Release date: November 27, 2022 [eBook #69431]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: Canada: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS D'ARCY MCGEE ***

[Frontispiece: THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE]



  THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE

  BY

  ALEXANDER BRADY

  Lecturer in Political Science,
  University of Toronto



  TORONTO
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
  1925




Copyright, Canada, 1925

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED


Printed in Canada




PREFATORY NOTE

In seeking information for this modest story of the life of Thomas
D'Arcy McGee, I received the kind assistance of the staff in the
Reference Library, Toronto, and also that of Dr. Doughty and his
staff in the Dominion Archives, Ottawa.  I must particularly
acknowledge a debt to Mr. J. J. McGee of Ottawa, brother of T. D'Arcy
McGee.  He kindly allowed me to examine the material which he had
collected concerning his distinguished brother.  Finally, I am
indebted to the editor of this series, Mr. W. S. Wallace, for helpful
suggestions and criticisms.

A. B.




CONTENTS


I YOUTH

II THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE

III THE PROPHET OF CANADIAN NATIONALITY

IV IN OFFICE AND OUT OF IT

V CONFEDERATION AND FENIANISM

VI CLOSING YEARS

VII CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY




THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE



CHAPTER I

YOUTH

Thomas D'Arcy McGee had a unique place among the Canadian statesmen
of his time.  His life was replete with dramatic interest.  Most of
those who stood by the cradle of Confederation, wherever they had
been born, were fashioned in their development by commonplace
Canadian conditions and environment.  Such was not the case with
McGee.  When he came to Canada, a young man of thirty-two, he had
already gone through the crucible of varied experiences.  In another
land and under different conditions he had battled for a lost cause.
He had risen quickly from impoverished boyhood to distinction.  He
had been a leader in an attempted revolution, a conspirator, a
fugitive rebel, an exile.  He had felt the thrill that comes to a
poet, and the less intense satisfaction that comes to the public
leader.  In the work that brought him fame, journalism, he had a
career equalled by few in its meteoric character.  He had been the
editor or assistant editor of five newspapers, and on both sides of
the Atlantic had borne a large share in intense controversies.  He
came to Montreal, in 1857, almost in the guise of an adventurer; and
the portion of his life woven into the story of Canada was no less
dramatic than that which preceded it.  Within a few months of his
arrival, he was elected to the colonial legislature; within a few
years, he was honoured as one of the outstanding statesmen of the
British colonies.  In that venture of political faith which resulted
in the establishment of the Dominion, he took a dominant share, and
was generally acclaimed its most eloquent champion.  His public life
in Canada was crushed into ten years, but within that period his
achievements had won him a permanent place in Canadian history.  Yet
in his career tragedy kept pace with brilliant success.  He had no
more than seen his cherished cause triumph when his life was cut
short by the bullet of a Fenian assassin, who mistook him for an
enemy of Ireland.

Like Abraham Lincoln, also the victim of an assassin, McGee was born
in a cottage.  But the country and circumstances surrounding the
birth of the two men were strikingly different.  The hero of the
American Civil War was reared amid the uncouth surroundings of the
frontier.  He never became freed from the social rawness of a
community arising from a wilderness.  McGee was born in the year
1825, at Carlingford, in the beautiful coast country of County Louth,
Ireland.  Carlingford is a shrine of natural beauty.  It is washed by
the blue waters of Carlingford Lough, and in the background are the
Mourne Mountains with their ever alternating shadows and sunshine.
In such congenial surroundings, rich in their associations with
Ireland's heroic past, McGee's childhood was spent.

His father was a coast-guard, whose remote ancestors had been the
famous Magees of Ulster.  But it was chiefly from his mother, not his
father, that McGee received his mental inheritance.  She was the
daughter of a Dublin bookseller, by name Morgan, who had been
implicated in the rebellion of 1798, and whose business as a
consequence had been ruined.  She was a woman of imagination, who
cherished the memory of her father's espousal of the national cause
and preserved all his national enthusiasms, which she sedulously fed
to her son, Thomas D'Arcy.  Her nationalism was not limited to the
mere aspiration that Ireland possess political independence.  She was
interested in all the old Irish myths, traditions, and poetry, and
these she related to her little "Tommie".  Thus, from infancy, he
grew up saturated in Irish literary lore, and an ardent idealist for
the nationality of his country.

The simple facts respecting McGee's childhood scarcely need
narrating.  They are facts that might be recounted with respect to
thousands of Irish boys of the same period.  His father brought his
family to Wexford when Thomas D'Arcy was eight years old, and McGee
later in life always associated Wexford with his youth.  In this city
he obtained the slender advantages of a day school education, and
came under the influence of a stimulating personality, the famous
Father Mathew.  This marvellously effective apostle of temperance,
who swayed the conduct of Irishmen as with a magic wand, was at the
time carrying on his triumphant campaign in southern Ireland.  His
appeal touched McGee.  Under Father Mathew's influence a juvenile
temperance society was established in Wexford.  One evening a slight
boy with flat face, dark skin and hair, and wonderfully expressive
eyes, delivered before the society a spell-binding oration, on which
he received the hearty congratulations of the great priest.  The boy
was young McGee, and this was his first public speech.  During the
next two years, 1840-1842, "little Tommy McGee's" speeches drew large
numbers to the society's meetings.  But Wexford was not long to claim
the boy orator.  His mother had died, his father had remarried, and
the family were not in affluent circumstances.  Ireland in the
forties held out few prospects to the children of the indigent.  The
economic structure of Irish society was diseased.  Approximately
seven million were vainly endeavouring to wring a lean subsistence
from the land, and hundreds of thousands were on the verge of famine.
Gloom and misery were written broad over the southern counties, lit
up but not relieved by the sputterings of political agitation.  The
one hope of the impoverished was the continent in the west, and a
mighty stream of emigration to that land of promise set in.  McGee
joined the emigrant throng.

Accompanied by a sister, he arrived in the United States with few
material possessions beyond the clothes on his back and a prize book
won at school.  The latter he disposed of during his first day in
Boston in order that he might be able to sleep under a roof.  His
destination had been the home of an aunt in Rhode Island, but Boston,
with its commercial activities and its hum of life, attracted him.
In June, 1842, he repaired there to seek his fortune.  Boston, like
every large American city, had many immigrant boys seeking fortunes,
and the hopes of the Irish lad must have shrunk away as the days of
unemployment passed and the empty future opened out.  Then, suddenly,
one of the many incidents which give a dramatic interest to McGee's
life occurred.  It was the practice of Bostonians, a patriotic people
mindful of their history, to commemorate the Fourth of July with a
civic celebration.  At the close of a much applauded public address,
a strange and very uncouth youth feverishly jumped on an old cart,
and for half an hour delivered in a voice of thrilling melody an
oration on the virtues of liberty.  Unknown by a soul in the large
throng, McGee was cheered for his audacity and success.  Next
morning, with still little hope of getting employment, he prepared to
return to his aunt in Rhode Island.  The story is related that he
called at the office of the _Boston Pilot_ with the purpose of
procuring something to read on his journey.  He was there recognized
by the observant proprietor as the silver-tongued youth of the
previous day.  A conversation was opened which resulted in the offer
of a position with the paper.  This offer he accepted, and thus he
became launched on the career of journalism which dragged him, as it
has dragged many obscure but talented youths, into the glaring light
of publicity.

He had the powers certain to extract success: a quick and
assimilative mind, an imagination that could clothe the dullest facts
in the most appealing colours, and a marvellous facility in
expressing himself.  Within a few months he revealed that he was
worth more than a mere clerkship, and became a travelling agent and
special correspondent.  To retain the support of those subscribers
who were immigrant Irish, the prominent questions of Irish politics
were threshed out in the columns of the _Pilot_.  McGee proved
invaluable in the presentation of Irish issues and in the vigorous
championship of the chief plank in O'Connell's platform, repeal of
the union of Great Britain and Ireland.  The powers of his
journalistic pen extended his fame throughout New England, and within
two years he became, with Walter J. Walsh, joint editor of the
_Pilot_.  An editor of the age of twenty is not a common phenomenon.
Still more uncommon is it when the youth in question is at the same
time winning a widely-extended reputation as a public speaker.  In
the forties, on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a passion for
public lectures.  Such great names as those of Carlyle, Emerson, and
Dickens were associated with the movement.  McGee's zeal to find
expression led him to deliver public lectures throughout New England,
and the magnetic charm of the born orator insured his success.  Few
public speakers could equal him in holding an audience enthralled.

The true instinct of the journalist--the desire to move public
opinion--acting on a mind naturally brilliant, won for the young
immigrant a local reputation in New England, but it also brought him
into all those dusty controversies and conflicts inseparable from
journalism.  He found himself in vital battle with the settled
prejudices of New England.  The large immigration from Ireland had in
this period begun to disturb old Bostonians, proud of their descent,
fictitious or real, from the Pilgrim fathers.  The leaven of
Puritanism made them detest the faith of the immigrants; their belief
in the wholesome virtues of their racial stock made them resent the
intrusion of the Celtic Irish; and their material well-being gave
them a snobbish dislike of ragged and impoverished peasants from the
bogs of Leinster and the rocky hillsides of Connaught.  A boycott of
Irish immigrants was launched, and against it McGee contended with
all his youthful fire.  Thus the first public cause for which he
expended his energies was the recognition of his race and faith in
the community life of New England.  In essence his plea was for
tolerance between class and class and sect and sect.  The arguments
that he advanced as youthful editor find a surprising echo in those
which he used twenty years later in the Canadian provinces.  It was
only through the tolerant recognition of different sects and races
that a new American community could be constituted.  Prejudices and
jealousies must be erased from social life, and the spirit of
goodwill developed.  It was a simple and ancient message, but one
that McGee both in the United States and in Canada never failed to
plead.

The defence of his countrymen led him in 1845 to publish his first
book, _Historical Sketches of O'Connell and His Friends_.  It is
written with the nervous eloquence and facility of all his later
works.  The most significant fact about it was the hero-worship which
he lavished upon the great Irish liberator.  "In him," he
enthusiastically wrote, "liberty will boast a model for all her
future reformers."  In his later Canadian career McGee showed himself
a consistent disciple of his hero of 1845.  He was a follower of
O'Connell in his implicit faith in attaining political visions by
moving first the popular mind through oratory and the press.
O'Connell is generally remembered as an agitator, but he was
something more than the word ordinarily connotes.  He was a political
educator, and a political educator of O'Connell's type McGee always
aspired to be.

In the year which witnessed the publication of his eulogy of
O'Connell, McGee's fame spread beyond Boston and its New England
environs.  Indeed, his articles on Repeal were read with keen and
satisfied interest in the club rooms of Dublin.  O'Connell himself
paid him a compliment by publicly referring to his editorials as "the
inspired writings of a young exiled Irish boy in America."  John
Gray, proprietor of the _Freeman's Journal_, which was O'Connell's
pillar of support, considered McGee's journalistic talent worthy of
enlistment in the service of his paper.  He offered him a liberally
paid position.  The result was that McGee returned to Dublin.  Only
three years had elapsed since his departure, but they were years
which had witnessed his rise from the position of a poor immigrant
boy, not unlike thousands who yearly crossed in the steerage to be
lost in the human eddies of American cities, to that of a newspaper
editor with a reputation in America and a certain distinction in
Ireland.  The rapid pace of his rise measures in some degree his
quantity of inborn talent and his determination to hew success from
the most untoward circumstances.

His position with the _Freeman_ brought him to London as a political
correspondent.  He had thus the advantage of viewing from the close
range of the press gallery the working of parliamentary institutions,
and we may assume that it enabled him to store away political and
constitutional precedents for future use.  But his political articles
did not please the proprietor of the _Freeman_.  The cause is to be
found in the fact that they showed the influence of a group of young
men with whom McGee on his return came to be associated, and who
profoundly influenced his whole development.  This group was the
party of Young Ireland.  At this period, Thomas Davis, a blending of
poet and man of affairs, was the guiding mind of the group, and the
Dublin _Nation_ was its organ of opinion.  The leaders were all men
of talent; a few were men of genius.  Next to Davis as an active and
persuasive writer was Charles Gavan Duffy, destined later to win
political laurels in Australia, and to leave no mean name in the
records of imperial statesmanship.  John Blake Dillon, father of a
subsequent Irish nationalist leader, was another forceful member of
the group.  Thomas Francis Meagher, in whose character were entwined
the chivalry of the soldier, the clear judgment of the statesman, and
the emotional intensity of the poet, was a third.  Other names might
be mentioned.  There was John Mitchel, a man of uncompromising mind
and a writer of powerful prose; Devin Reilly, a brilliant but
rancorous youth, who in the next year was to consider McGee as his
rival; and James Mangan, a poet of wasted genius.

All of these men were young.  Few of them were over thirty.  With
that hopefulness which is the gift of youth, they were driven by the
ideal of recreating Ireland by awakening her national consciousness.
Their task was similar to that of their great contemporary, Mazzini,
in Italy.  They sought to arouse the Irish people to act for the
national good, to sink all sectarian animosities and class prejudices
which tended to dissipate the nation's energy on trifling ends.
Their outlook was not limited to material welfare or bare political
liberty.  They endeavoured to revivify the cultural life of Ireland,
to give a more vital direction to its art, and to develop a more
intense literature.  Their cherished motto was "Educate that you may
be free."

Soon after his return from America, McGee met the members of this
group, and readily subscribed to their doctrines and shared their
enthusiasms.  Their ideas were new food for his mind, and he never
wholly shed the influence of their fervid idealism.  When he later
pleaded the cause of Canadian nationality, he did so in the spirit
and through the inspiration of the Young Ireland creed.  We have from
the pen of Gavan Duffy an interesting impression of McGee, when he
became a disciple of Young Ireland: "The young man was not
prepossessing.  He had a face of almost African type, his dress was
slovenly even for the careless class to which he belonged, he looked
unformed and had a manner which struck me at first sight as too
deferential for self-respect.  But he had not spoken three sentences
in a singularly sweet and flexible voice till it was plain that he
was a man in whom one might dimly discover rudiments of the orator,
poet and statesman hidden under the ungainly disguise."  Needless to
say, Duffy gladly welcomed such a promising recruit in his loosely
formed association.

McGee's new alliance damaged his connection with the _Freeman_.  His
articles tended to be too speculative and not sufficiently of the
sober-suited type desired by the commercial classes who supported
O'Connell and the _Freeman_.  Moreover, he came to spend more time in
the British Museum digging up the materials for Irish history than in
the press gallery following the ingenuities of Peel's politics.  His
best literary efforts, which absorbed most of his time, were his
articles for the _Nation_, and the tone of these was not acceptable
to O'Connell.  Finally, Gray, becoming dissatisfied, brought his
engagement to a close.  Duffy, who valued McGee's talent highly,
immediately employed him as London correspondent for the _Nation_,
and until his flight from Ireland in 1848 he remained an expounder,
through the press, of Young Ireland's varying hopes and policies.
Sectarian prejudices and colourless enthusiasm for the national cause
all encountered his virulent denunciation, and he sought in
accordance with the _Nation's_ prospectus "to direct the popular mind
and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of
nationality."

Meanwhile events in Ireland were hurrying to a dismal crisis.  At the
end of 1845 the famine had begun to creep gloomily over the land, and
within the next nine months it had the country in its relentless
grip.  Despair prevailed everywhere, except in Dublin, where the
calamity merely drove the political parties to more feverish
controversies.  The Young Irelanders were breaking with O'Connell and
his repeal agitation.  On the founding of the _Nation_ in 1842, Davis
and his associates had strongly supported the O'Connellite movement,
but as time passed the difficulties of co-operation between the
younger men and the old agitator became manifest.  For a generation
O'Connell had been the uncrowned king of Ireland.  He had swayed her
masses with his fertile brain and facile tongue.  His triumph in the
movement of Catholic emancipation, when he had conquered Wellington
and convinced Peel, had given him a confidence which was now proving
fatal.  In the forties of the century he was reaching the sere and
yellow leaf of his career, but his ambition to maintain an
unquestioned control of Irish affairs remained as keen as ever, and
prompted him to look with critical suspicion upon the Young Ireland
group.  It is the lot of old men seldom to understand the generation
that hurriedly presses behind them with its new hopes and fresh
methods.  They view its visions with frank uneasiness, and in the
rheumy conservatism of age condemn its vibrant actions as erratic and
destructive.  It was so with O'Connell.  He mocked the Young Ireland
talk of recreating the nation, he scorned its literary aspirations,
he suspected its condemnation of sectarianism, and he distrusted its
methods.  In 1846, the Young Irelanders under the stress of the
famine had begun to talk of following the precedent of Pym and
Hampden and winning political liberty for Ireland by the sword; they
who had been content merely to champion the Irish cultural
renaissance, now proclaimed that Ireland could not be saved alone by
poetry.  She must have action.  But O'Connell, who had been taught
prudence by long and exacting experiences, condemned this rash talk.
The younger generation in Ireland took his prudence as timidity, and
spurned his words of caution.

The elements of disruption long existing between O'Connell and the
Young Irelanders ripened in July, 1846, when the younger men seceded
from the Repeal Association.  But the critical nature of affairs
consequent upon the famine once more herded together the national
leaders, and in February, 1847, a Repeal Confederation was formed
with objects somewhat similar to those of the former association.
The formation of this Confederation marked McGee's first
participation in active politics.  He had hurried back from the calm
atmosphere of London to the hectic politics of Dublin, and was made a
councillor of the Confederation.  It is unnecessary to follow his
manœuvres amongst the Dublin politicians.  We catch a glimpse of
him in the comments of a country gentleman who had dropped in to hear
the debates in the Confederation.  He was at the outset very much
displeased at seeing a mere boy, ill-dressed and singularly ugly,
rise to address an assembly which had as its object the saving of
Ireland.  But his displeasure vanished, and he was seized with
amazement when he found the boy with smiling confidence deliver a
statesmanlike oration that captivated his audience.  McGee had,
moreover, other acquirements in addition to oratory, for the council
sufficiently prized his executive ability to make him its secretary.

The fates quickly precipitated events in Ireland.  In the spring of
1847 O'Connell died, and his death plunged the nationalist movement
into a morass.  "The king of the forest is dead," wrote a
contemporary, "and there is neither lion nor lion's cub to fill his
vacant place."  John O'Connell, the Liberator's son, aspired to the
leadership formerly held by his father, but he was not a lion.  He
was wholly unable to act with McGee and the Young Irelanders, and all
possibility of united action on Irish affairs vanished.  Following
the French Revolution of February, 1848, which transferred
revolutionary enthusiasm to Ireland as to every other country in
Europe, John Mitchel, with the recklessness and Ishmaelite
characteristics of a born revolutionist, preached an armed uprising.
Others, including McGee, suddenly echoed his sentiments, and
revolutionary clubs sprang into being.  These constituted in June a
special executive to which they were to yield obedience.

McGee became a member of the executive committee of five and went to
his task of creating a revolution with flushed enthusiasm.  A venture
promising a quick fame and success to the public cause presented
itself.  A delegate arrived from the Irish Confederates at Glasgow
stating that they had a considerable supply of arms and ammunition,
and if a known and daring leader were sent them, four or five hundred
men would volunteer for an expedition to Ireland.  They might seize a
steamer on the Clyde, and sail for Sligo or Killala.  Thus, by a
diversion in the west, they could strike British power a blow from
the rear.  There was too much of a dramatic appeal in this adventure
for McGee to refuse when it was suggested that he be the leader.
Visions of emulating Paul Jones danced before his mind, and away he
sped the same evening for Scotland, while his associates matured
their plans in Ireland.

With rapid dispatch McGee consulted the Irish revolutionists in
Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Greenock, and enrolled four hundred
volunteers.  The crew of a steamer sailing from Greenock was won
over, and it was arranged that the arms should be placed on board as
merchandise.  While he was developing his plans, McGee was recognized
by the police; and, his arrest being under consideration, the
revolutionary committee insisted that he leave immediately and
proceed to Sligo, where he could extemporize arrangements for the
landing of the expedition.  He reached Sligo early in August, and
there awaited developments, scanning the rocky and picturesque shores
of Lough Gill in the character of a Dublin student on holiday.

The news that finally reached him shattered his hopes.  He learned
how Smith O'Brien had led his insurgents to the so-called battle of
Ballingarry, which ended, pantomime-like, in Widow McCormack's
cabbage patch.  O'Brien, Meagher, McManus, and other leaders, he
heard, were in the hands of the government, and the revolutionary
organization had collapsed like a punctured balloon.  The peasantry,
on whom the success of the movement finally depended, were more eager
to escape in emigrant ships from an impoverished country than to
fight for a revolutionary government.

To America McGee's eyes were immediately turned.  He made his way to
Derry, where the bishop and his clergy sheltered him.  Thence in the
dress of a priest, with his breviary in his hand and with a sad
heart, he boarded a brig at the mouth of the Foyle, and sailed for
the United States.  He became one of the many disillusioned who in
this year of unfulfilled revolutions streamed across the Atlantic.
His departure from Ireland was not, however, as he might have
thought, the close, but the more vital opening, of his career.  In
America he began at the age of twenty-three a new life in which he
was destined to plead for causes that were to prove more successful
than that of Irish independence in 1848.




CHAPTER II

THE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE

In early October, 1848, McGee arrived in Philadelphia, and before the
close of the month he was in the exciting swirl of American
journalism.  He established the _New York Nation_, patterned much
after the Dublin _Nation_.  It was frankly an Irish-American organ
which gave special attention to the politics of Ireland, and to the
means whereby Irishmen in the new world might advance the interests
of their native country.  It was written with that intense bitterness
towards Britain characteristic of the journals of most exiled
Irishmen.  It is interesting to find the man who in 1868 was
described by Lord Mayo as "the most eloquent advocate of British rule
on the face of the world" vowing in 1848 to dedicate all his days to
the ruin of British power.  But McGee's opinions were to travel a
changeful journey between these two dates.

His prospects in New York were promising.  Although young, he had
already a wide reputation as an Irish leader, and a large population
in New York and the neighbouring states was prepared to support his
paper.  But youthful rashness damaged his prospective success.  Soon
after his arrival in America, he wrote some public letters
attributing the failure of the Irish revolutionary movement to the
influence of the clergy.  He argued that they were primarily
responsible for the fact that the peasantry had not risen at the
critical moment.  Such a reflection upon the patriotism of the Irish
clergy brought into the field against McGee an experienced and
formidable controversialist in Bishop Hughes of New York.  The bishop
had proved his steel in many a public duel, and his ardent Irish
patriotism had given him a vast prestige over his flock.  Having
closely followed affairs in Ireland, he was well prepared to meet
McGee's challenge.  He argued that blame for the failure of the
insurrection must not be placed upon the clergy, but upon the leaders
of Young Ireland, prominent among whom was McGee himself.  They had
precipitated a rebellion for which they had made no serviceable
preparation, and thus exposed the peasantry to destruction by British
soldiery.  The priests, by restraining their flocks from rebellion,
had alone saved them from disaster.  Bishop Hughes was not content
with such argument.  He denounced McGee as being faithless to his
church and creed, which elicited from the latter the reply that "My
crime is not that I do not believe in the creed of my fathers and my
affections, but that I have failed to pay my court to some great
unknown who sits chafing on his chair, impatient of his daily dose of
honied praises."

The futile controversy that ensued proved fatal to the fortunes of
McGee's paper.  His joust with the most powerful Catholic
ecclesiastic in America alienated the sympathies of those who might
otherwise have given him support.  He had jockeyed himself into the
false position of being anti-clerical, a position which in the
nineteenth century seldom won the support of Irish Catholics.  The
situation was all the more unfortunate in that he held many views in
common with Bishop Hughes, and was later to become his warm friend.
In the midst of the controversy, he received from Gavan Duffy an
invitation to assist once more in the editing of the Dublin _Nation_.
Duffy wrote with the enticing remark that "as a writer and a speaker
there is not any Irishman living whose help I would as soon have as
yours."  All the weight of pleasant associations tugged at him to
return.  In his youthful verse a dominant note was a longing for his
native land:

  Where'er I turned, some emblem still
  Roused consciousness upon my track;
  Some hill was like an Irish hill,
  Some wild-bird's whistle call'd me back.

But the vision of leading the Irish in America had captivated his
imagination, and he refused Duffy's offer.  None the less he
determined to shift the scene of his work.  He sold out the _Nation_,
went to Boston, and in August, 1850, established his second paper,
the _American Celt_.

During the next seven years, his career was that of an itinerant and
rather restless journalist.  In 1851 he was publishing the _Celt_,
and championing the interests of the Irish in Buffalo.  The following
year, he was in New York, feverishly dashing off editorials to guide
his Catholic countrymen through the stormy passages of mid-century
American politics.  There are few recess periods in the career of
political journalism.  It is an incessant battle demanding continuous
vigilance and tireless effort.  McGee, in New York, fully experienced
its exacting claims, and satisfied them sufficiently to make his
paper the most powerful Irish-American organ of the period.

The fifties were a stirring decade in the history of the American
republic.  They were marked by an intense feverishness in politics as
the question of slavery loomed higher on the horizon.  The giant
strides of material development, the pushing back of the frontier by
the advancing lines of railway, the expansion of commerce, the
marvellous growth of population, all added a buoyancy to American
life which tended to draw newcomers into its tide.  Carl Schurz, the
young German revolutionist of 1848, was only a few years in the
country when he became a party leader, swinging the votes of the
western Germans in support of the Republican platform.  Similarly
many of McGee's fellow Young Irelanders became champions of American
parties.  John Mitchel's brilliant, but bitter pen was enlisted in
the service of the Democrats.  McGee, however, kept free from the
meshes of party affiliations.  Throughout his career of journalism in
New York, he continued to consider himself as a new immigrant
fighting the battles of the new immigrants.  He set himself to be the
sentinel and champion of his people, to safeguard their interests,
and to direct their development amid the plastic conditions of
American society.  It was no easy task.  In the twelve odd years
following the famine, emigration from Ireland to the United States
continued in a steady stream.  Between 1846 and 1851, a quarter of a
million left Ireland each year; between 1851 and 1861, over 100,000
left annually.  Most of these found their destination in the American
cities of the Atlantic seaboard.  McGee saw their need of leadership.
They were chiefly peasants and small farmers, pushed from their land
in Ireland by famine and eviction.  Concerning the relentless
struggle of city life they knew nothing.  Of the political issues of
American cities they had no knowledge, and their ignorance exposed
them to the ready wiles of ward bosses in search of votes.  Promises
were readily made to them and as readily unfulfilled.  But, above
all, their political position and interests were endangered in the
fifties by the rise of the famous Know-Nothing party, with which
McGee was in warfare during the greater portion of his residence in
New York.

Know-Nothingism was a development of the native American movement of
the forties.  The support tendered by the Irish immigrants to the
Democrats had assisted in the disorganization and severe defeat of
the Republican party.  Hence many disappointed Republican leaders
determined to form an organization which should withhold political
rights from European newcomers.  At first they organized a secret
fraternity called the "Know-Nothings" from "I don't know," the
ever-repeated reply of its members to inquiry about its nature.  The
original name bestowed upon the fraternity by its founders was "The
Sons of '76", or the "Order of the Star-Spangled Banner"; and its
slogan was "America for the Americans."  Its favourite counter-sign
was the traditional order of Washington, "Put none but Americans on
guard to-night."  The national sentiment behind the society was
reinforced by Protestant sectarian zeal, since its organizers were
concerned not merely with depriving immigrants of power, but with
excluding all Catholics from office.

Thanks to the allure of its novelty, this party developed with
phenomenal rapidity.  In 1854 its candidates swept the elections in
Massachusetts, and Gardiner, its nominee, became governor of the
state.  Its members sought to control nomination for office by secret
conventions of delegates.  They bound themselves to cast no votes for
any except Protestant-born citizens, and endeavoured to alter the
naturalization laws so that foreigners might not be allowed to vote
until they had resided twenty-one years in the country.  The
Know-Nothing party could never have had more than temporary success.
As Horace Greeley, the noted editor of the New York _Tribune_,
remarked, it "would seem as devoid of the elements of persistence as
an anti-cholera or an anti-potato-rot party would be."  But McGee,
like other leaders of the swelling Irish population, was alarmed at
its growing strength.  It threatened to proscribe the men of his
faith, and to exclude from the exercise of political rights
immigrants like himself who sought a new home in the republic.  In
the columns of the _Celt_, he attacked its aims, assailed its
champions, and marshalled Irish-American opinion against it.  There
is little doubt that this conflict, in which McGee was engaged during
the last five years of his residence in New York, did much to
disillusion him in respect to American life and institutions.

A few years before he had written the lines:

  Hail to the land whose broad domain
  Rejoices under Freedom's reign
  Where neither right nor race is banned.

But he no longer viewed the republic as a Utopia.  He now discovered
that the so-called land of freedom was a land of intolerance, and his
migration to Canada was largely due to the action of the Know-Nothing
faction.  As he later remarked, "I did not want to be a citizen on
sufferance, as it were, courted one day and proscribed the next."

But McGee served the immigrants in other ways than by fighting the
Know-Nothing platform.  He encouraged them to seek their own
self-development.  He preached the homely precepts of industry, and
urged them to study the laws and customs of their new country in
order to be able to view intelligently its problems.  The most
helpful assistance that could be rendered to the indigent newcomers
was to provide them with the facilities for education.  During his
early residence in Boston, McGee had realized this, and it was due
largely to his labours that night schools for adults were engrafted
on the educational system.  The same work he now earnestly promoted
in New York, with benefit to immigrants of every race.  But his most
emphatic plea was that his countrymen should move from the crowded
tenements and congested industries of the eastern cities to the
homestead lands of the West.  "We must," he wrote in the _Celt_,
"urge them on and on.  We must shame them out of cellars and sewers,
and endeavour by every art to awaken in their hearts the passion for
competency, so natural and laudable in a new and unsettled country."
For a time he had the dream of establishing an Irish state in the
western territories--an inland Erin--which should draw thither the
Irish immigrants.  For this purpose, in 1856, he took a leading part
in calling a conference of leading Irish Americans at Buffalo.
Although the dream of an Irish state in the west was not realized,
McGee's advocacy of western settlement was not futile.  Many
flourishing homesteads in Illinois and Wisconsin bore witness to the
zeal with which he advocated western colonization.

By 1852 a considerable change had taken place in McGee's thought.
When he had reached Philadelphia in the autumn of 1848, he was a
revolutionist with all that lack of compromise which accompanies
youth.  He shared the idealism of the ardent patriots who had been
prepared to take any and every means for the quick attainment of
Irish freedom.  As one Young Irelander had said: "If the altar stood
in the way of national liberty, then down with the altar."  The path
to Ireland's freedom should, if necessary, cut through every
institution and be impeded by no consideration.  But four years of
controversial journalism in America shook McGee's former
revolutionary faith.  In a letter to a friend, published in the
_Celt_, he confessed that in the past he had been on the wrong track.
He found that he had neglected some of the primary principles which
govern the world.  In the future he was determined to put all
political action to the test of a simple creed, the chief tenet of
which was a belief in Christendom and the Catholic church.  The
revolutionary liberalism which sought in the name of liberty to tear
down the church and other institutions was reprehensible, and to be
resisted.  It is not to be assumed that by this profession of faith
McGee suddenly, in 1852, saw, like Paul on the Damascus road, a new
light.  The fact is that in Ireland he had been a revolutionist
largely by the accident of events.  By temperament he had none of
those Ishmaelite characteristics which go to make the revolutionary.
"My native disposition," he declared in the Canadian parliament some
years later, "is towards reverence for things old, and veneration for
the landmarks of the past."  Away from Ireland's hectic politics his
temperament reasserted itself.  His reverence for things old fed his
loyalty to his church, and led him henceforth to discountenance all
movements for the freeing of Ireland which did not receive its
conservative sanction.  As subsequent events show, he remained the
champion of reform for his native land, as for the country of his
adoption, but he was ever emphatic in his denunciation of the violent
methods of conspiracy and revolution.  His change of front brought
him into friction with many Irish Americans like John Mitchel and the
founders of Fenianism, and this fact, linked with the existence of
Know-Nothingism, largely explained his departure to Canada in 1857.

McGee at various times had made visits to the British colonies.  He
had delivered public lectures in Montreal.  He had summered on Lake
Huron, had written letters to his paper from the upper Ottawa, and
had passed through the rich meadows and orchards of the Annapolis
valley in Nova Scotia.  At all times he was struck with the orderly
and secure society of the British provinces, while his imagination
had been kindled by the magnificent future which stretched before
them.  He early visualized them as the germ cells of a new nation.
He was, therefore, prepared in 1857 to accept readily the invitation
of some Canadian Irishmen to become their leader in Lower Canada.  A
delegation consisting of such prominent Irish Canadians of the period
as Frank Smith, Patrick Brennan, and James Donnelly went to New York,
interviewed McGee, and obtained his acceptance of their invitation.
In the spring of 1857 he moved to Montreal, and there began his
Canadian career.

To McGee British North America seemed on the threshold of a new and
promising era.  The steam-boat was drawing the provinces closer to
Britain.  The telegraph and Atlantic cable were making possible more
intimate co-operation between the various provinces themselves, and
between them and the mother country.  The building of railways
promised in the near future to bridge the dreary distances of forest
and rock which severed the various colonies from one another and kept
them as far apart as Europe is from America.  In addition to these
facts was another laden with rich hope, the prospective annexation to
the Canadas of the vast hinterland then under the dominion of the
Hudson's Bay Company.  What are now the rolling wheat fields of
Manitoba and Saskatchewan were in 1857 merely the hunting grounds of
trappers, employed by one of the mightiest of British mercantile
corporations.  Yet there were some men who had caught a glimpse of
the potential value of those extensive lands beyond Lake Superior.
They described them as the natural field of expansion for the eastern
colonies and advocated their annexation.  Under the inspiration of
these pregnant facts, McGee in May, 1857, established in Montreal a
tri-weekly paper, called the _New Era_ as indicative of the time of
its birth.

The paper had too brief a career to exercise much influence on public
life.  Moreover, in 1857, McGee, as a newcomer, was of necessity
feeling his way amid the shoals and narrows of Canadian politics, and
was unable to discuss local issues with intimacy.  None the less, the
_New Era_ has an outstanding significance in Canadian history.  It
was the first newspaper in the British colonies dedicated to the
cause of colonial union and the establishment of a British American
nationality under the rule of a royal prince.  It advanced the chief
arguments for union employed eight years later at the conferences of
Charlottetown and Quebec.  It pleaded an aspiration not finally
realized for another ten years.  To McGee nothing seemed more
apparent than that the Canadas and the colonies by the sea should
form the nucleus of a nation.  The essential means was the
development of a common will strong enough to overcome the obstacles
in the way of closer co-operation.

The vision of a united British America was not new.  It was as old as
the existence of the colonies.  It grew naturally out of the presence
of a number of scattered communities whose common interests could
best be served by a common government.  Previous to the American
Revolution the great Franklin had advocated such a union for the
thirteen colonies.  After the Revolution it found many champions in
the territories which remained under the British crown.  In 1790,
while the Constitutional Act for the Canadian provinces was being
fashioned, Chief Justice Smith suggested a plan for the comprehensive
government of all the colonies.  In the succeeding years, many others
made similar suggestions--Uniacke in Nova Scotia, Sewell in Quebec,
William Lyon Mackenzie, the fiery Canadian agitator, and John
Beverley Robinson, an Upper Canadian who had pondered long and
carefully on colonial issues.  Even the distinguished name of Lord
Durham was associated with the idea.  He recommended it as the one
means of developing for the colonies a British American nationality,
which should rival the robust and aggressive nationality across the
southern frontier.

After 1850, the conception was dragged into the daylight of practical
politics.  A number of prominent Canadians saw in it the one solvent
of the constitutional difficulties arising from the Union Act of
1841.  In April, 1856, A. A. Dorion, leader of the Lower Canadian
Liberals, pleaded in parliament for the federal union of the two
Canadas.  Thus, the idea had already entered the stage of practical
discussion when McGee established his _New Era_.  But with the
politicians it was entertained largely as a gateway of escape from
the political embarrassments of the existing system, and was made
subsidiary to party considerations.  McGee in his paper fired it with
a wider emotional appeal.  With him it was not the product of close
grappling with the political difficulties of the Union Act, but a
poet's vision.  It was a dream in the fulfilment of which lay a
mighty future for all the peoples of British North America.  With a
newcomer's freshness of observation, he saw in the colonies
possibilities of development which had lain largely unnoticed by the
public men of the colonies.  He thought as much of the social and
spiritual consequences of union as of the political.  It would not
merely provide the British provinces with the strength of a common
government, but would knit the scattered colonists into a united,
self-reliant people, with a common will and common hopes, the true
evidence of nationality.  Union would carve the way for the emergence
of a great new northern nation.  It would provide the people with
vision, and destroy the cramping parochialism of their existing
political life.

In British American union, McGee at last discovered a cause that
vividly appealed to his imagination.  He found it on taking up
residence in Montreal, and it shaped his career in the succeeding ten
years.  It replaced in his sentiments his former fervour for Irish
liberty.  In its advocacy he never grew weary, and the decade
previous to Confederation found no more fervid apostle of British
American union and nationality than McGee.  He pleaded it, not merely
through the press, but on the public platform.  Being in demand as a
lecturer, he used every occasion to unfold his favourite subject.  In
one of his most famous addresses, delivered at Ottawa on October 9,
1857, he arrayed the various arguments for union.  "If we extend our
vision so as to embrace all British North America, we survey a region
larger than all Europe.  If we have no coal, Nova Scotia has
abundance.  If Newfoundland has an indifferent soil, this Ottawa
valley can grow wheat enough to supply all that is required.
Throughout this wider view we find at least four millions already in
the field--one quarter more than laid the neighbouring republic.
Nature pronounces for the union of the provinces.  Canada needs a
sea-coast."

In addition to the arguments drawn from geography and economic needs
were others no less cogent.  Union was imperative for defence.
Political weakness was always a tempting bait to a neighbouring
power.  The great resources of the British colonies combined with
their lack of unity might well induce the American republic to
attempt conquest.  Especially was the St. Lawrence waterway tempting
to the United States, since in the course of time it must become the
shipping route for the wheat harvests of the West.  The power in
possession of it would control the chief roadway to the grain fields.
In addition the colonies had other resources for which union alone
could give adequate protection, rich fisheries, extensive forests,
fertile lands.  "Facts are logical, and unless we dream that the laws
of cause and effect will be suspended in our favour, we must look
either to the internal union or the political extinction of these
provinces at no distant day."  Not merely would the wealthy natural
resources of British North America be preserved, but they would best
be developed by the consolidation of the colonies into one state.
With such a system McGee looked forward to Canada possessing, by the
close of the century, 25,000,000 people.  Moreover, he anticipated
the appearance of all the other more brilliant, if less tangible,
accomplishments of national life, which had difficulty in arising
under the existing political disunion, a native literature, with
developments in art, science, and philosophy.

McGee went further than marshalling arguments for union.  He
described in general terms the nature of the constitution suitable
for the colonies.  He considered it neither desirable nor possible
that the various provinces with their diverse geographical characters
and economic interests should be fused into one political unit.  "Our
river system indicates our union, railroads and canals will
strengthen these natural bonds, but complete oneness of political
life must still be wanting to sea-beaten Newfoundland and the
wheat-bearing West."  The same geographical facts which pressed the
need of union made the recognition of local autonomy imperative.  The
new constitution must be federal, allowing a large measure of local
autonomy, while constituting a central government to deal with common
interests.  Many of the leading Fathers of Confederation, most
prominent among whom was Sir John A. Macdonald, began with the
suggestion of a legislative union, and only with reluctance in the
heat of constitution-building recognized the need of federal
institutions.  But with keen insight McGee saw from the outset that
only federation could be the goal of British Americans.  Provincial
governments with the recognition of certain provincial rights would
be a guarantee of liberty in the new state.

In December, 1857, an additional field was opened in which McGee
might extend the advocacy of his new found cause.  A body of citizens
in Montreal nominated him for parliament, and in the ensuing contest
he was elected as one of the three representatives of the city.  Thus
began the most constructive venture of his career.




CHAPTER III

THE PROPHET OF CANADIAN NATIONALITY

McGee entered Canadian politics at a crucial period.  Most of the old
issues over which political battles had been fought were
disappearing.  Responsible Government in principle at least was
recognized by all parties.  The Clergy Reserves, which had frequently
ruffled the peace of provincial politics, had in 1854 been settled
with reasonable satisfaction to those concerned.  In the same year
the thorny question of seigniorial tenure in Lower Canada had
received its quietus.  A chapter of hoary Canadian controversies was
closed, and a chapter with the newer problems of the United Canadas
opened.  One of the most prominent aspects of the new era was the
appearance of railways.  Quaint locomotives, mere playtoys in
comparison with the huge masses of steel which now rumble over the
Canadian lines, began to glide by the snake fences of the farmer, and
introduced a new touch to the Canadian landscape and a new issue to
Canadian politics.  The incorporation of railways as the promised
means of developing the Canadas became the absorbing subject with
provincial statesmen, and the parliamentary debates became bulky with
all the dry details of railway management.  But the most ominous
problem of the time was that of attempting to work the scheme of
union established by the Act of 1841.  In the years immediately
following 1858 the union underwent its severest tests, and began to
fail as an effective means of government.  Amid the accumulating
difficulties of politicians, the Confederation movement had its rise.
In this movement McGee from the outset played a vital role.

The first important question confronting McGee in 1857 was the choice
of a party.  Canadian parties in the period were notoriously
unsteady.  Prominent men readily shed old alliances for new ones, and
this readiness for change gave a makeshift appearance to party
affiliations.  The legislature was like a ballroom in its quick
shifting of political partners.  There were four distinct groups.  In
Lower Canada the Reformers were known as the _Parti Rouge_, and were
led by A. A. Dorion, a very able but doctrinaire Liberal.  Following
the elections of December, 1857, this group was a small minority,
thanks largely to the nimble-mindedness and dynamic energy of George
E. Cartier, leader of the _Bleus_, the opposing group.  In Upper
Canada the government party, known as Liberal-Conservatives, was led
by John A. Macdonald, and the Reformers were under the command of
George Brown.  With the latter were loosely associated a small band
who followed Sandfield Macdonald, and were known as Sandfield
Macdonald's "tail".  On McGee's entrance to the legislature, the
government was described as the Macdonald-Cartier administration.
During the next four years it was preserved in power by the majority
of Lower Canadian members, marshalled by Cartier, and a number of
Upper Canadians drawn by the winning personality of John A. Macdonald.

In view of McGee's subsequent career, it is possible that he might in
1857 have accepted a nomination from the party of Macdonald and
Cartier.  Certain considerations drew him to support Dorion and the
_Parti Rouge_, but they were hardly of a nature to overcome the
strong attraction of a warm welcome from the government party.  Such
a welcome was not extended.  The fact is that those in power were
somewhat dubious concerning this new man, with his chequered career
and his reputation for brilliance.  One who, only ten years before,
had been a rebel against the Queen might not prove of much help to a
party in a colony where loyalty was fashionable.  Political leaders
before investing in new stock must be sure of a good return, and in
this case they were in doubt.  McGee did not receive their
nomination.  Hence he gave his support to the _Rouges_, with whom he
had more genuine sympathy.  It is interesting that he thus entered
Canadian political life as an advanced reformer, the opponent of John
A. Macdonald, with whom his name was later linked.  In the election
of December, 1857, Dorion stood at the top of the poll in Montreal
with his follower, McGee, a close second.  The other four candidates
trailed behind with Cartier at the bottom, five hundred votes below
McGee.

Some eighteen months after his election, McGee outlined in four
public letters to his Irish-Canadian constituents his views on
Canadian parties.  They adequately explain why for four years he
supported the Opposition, consorting with Dorion, George Brown, and
other uncompromising opponents of the Cartier-Macdonald ministry.  He
attributed to the _Bleus_ an exclusive Canadianism.  They had no wish
to welcome immigrants, for they dreamed of a French Canada existing
isolated, alone, and still French on the map of North America.  Their
conception of French-Canadian nationality was too narrow to allow the
development of a broad conception of Canadian nationality, so
essential in a land of warring sects and races.  The _Rouges_, on the
other hand, were more in touch with modern tendencies, and more
disposed to recognize as their Canadian countrymen the newer
immigrants who spoke a different tongue and were of another race.  In
them the Irish Canadians of Lower Canada could find more congenial
allies than among the _Bleus_.  McGee on this occasion worked in his
own fervid gospel of a nationality, which would recognize
distinctions of neither race nor creed: "For my own part, I respect
every nationality represented on our soil; but yet I hold we should
consider them rather as invaluable materials to a desired end, than
as finalities themselves.  I hope to see the day, or at least the eve
of the day, when there will be no other term to our patriotism, but
the common name of Canadian, without the prefix of either French or
British."

He advised his Catholic countrymen in Upper Canada that they support
in their section of the province the Reform party of George Brown.
Brown was something of a knight errant.  He was bold in tilting with
abuses, and ever ready to ride about the colony in search of them.
McGee was won by Brown's frank, fearless character.  Moreover, he
believed that the Irish Catholics of Upper Canada could subscribe
with little reservation to the Reform leader's principles.  They
shared with Brown a hostility to the intolerant Toryism of the old
school, and entertained his faith in the widest extension of popular
suffrage, economy in public expenditure, and reduction in taxation.
But there were two issues on which McGee was not in harmony with
Brown.  He did not believe that the adoption of representation by
population would, as Brown so ardently argued, heal the ills of
Canadian government.  Also, contrary to the belief of the Upper
Canadian, he thought that separate religious schools should receive
more definite recognition by the provincial legislature.  These
questions were to arise frequently during his political career, and a
statement of his position on them may be conveniently postponed.

In March, 1858, the parliamentary session began.  From the outset,
McGee hurried into the leading debates, and attacked the
"corruptionists", as the government party was described, with all the
weapons of polished wit and searching sarcasm.  His reputation as an
orator had preceded him, and his maiden speech was eagerly awaited.
None of the assembled legislators was disappointed.  A press
correspondent wrote that McGee had scarcely spoken three sentences in
a silvery, penetrating mezzo-soprano before he had the audience in
that pleasurable grip which only the highly endowed orator can
attain.  "Of loud declamation," wrote another contemporary observer,
"there was not a vestige, and scarcely a change of attitude.  He
merely placed the finger of his right hand occasionally on the palm
of his left, then let both hands fall by his sides, or on occasion
lifted the right hand in solemn warning, but as he warmed up a
magnificent period with an appeal to the justice of his cause, or the
manhood of his country, his whole frame shook, light darted from his
eyes, he was so to say transfigured."  The correspondent of the
_Globe_ wrote that he was "undoubtedly the most finished orator in
the House....  He has the peculiar power of impressing an audience,
which can only be accounted for by attributing to those who possess
it some magnetic influence not common to everyone."

The methods of the government in the previous election gave him an
opportunity of displaying facetiousness and extracting roars of
laughter from all sides of the chamber.  Cayley, the
inspector-general, had unsuccessfully contested a seat in the
counties of Huron and Bruce.  One of his electioneering devices had
been that of presenting several Orange lodges of these counties with
beautifully bound copies of the sacred scriptures.  "It was a
spectacle," remarked McGee, "rare and refreshing to see the
inspector-general, the chancellor of the exchequer, the finance
minister of the province, voluntarily turn missionary and act the
part of a colporteur in the neighbourhood of Lake Huron.  He must
further remark that the good people of these counties seemed to have
studied the sacred volume presented to them from so high a source to
good effect.  They appeared to have learnt the lesson of retributive
justice, for although they accepted the gospel, they rejected the
missionary."

There is something in parliamentary life that appeals to the fighting
instinct, and men in opposition feel more free to indulge in it.
McGee did so with undisguised recklessness.  In the opinion of
sober-minded people he seemed over-ready to engage in the battles of
debate.  One of the most controversial questions of the period was
the choice of a site for the government.  Up to 1858 the capital had
been shunted about almost in the manner of a freight car, remaining
at the most only four years in any one city.  Such an arrangement was
obviously not satisfactory.  Yet there was real difficulty in
deciding which of the rival cities should be the permanent capital.
Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton--all had their
advocates who fought for their respective centres with the public
enthusiasm of men whose parliamentary seats depended upon the extent
to which they promoted local interests.  A decision in favour of any
one city might spell the death of the ministry.  The
Macdonald-Cartier government of 1858, unwilling to enter an early
grave, hit upon an expedient which might remove responsibility from
their heads.  They passed a resolution requesting the Queen to choose
among the rival cities.  The Queen or her ministers could have little
knowledge of the respective merits of the various Canadian cities,
and it is likely that she acted on advice from Canada.  In any case
she decided in favour of a village, Bytown, in the backwoods of the
Ottawa river.  From a ragged settlement, in the country of lumbermen,
the village has since grown into the beautiful Ottawa.  The
Opposition was up in arms against the Queen's decision.  McGee, who
was frankly a champion of Montreal, flung himself into the debate,
pleading the advantages of Lower Canada's largest city.

The final upshot was the resignation of the government, and the
calling of Brown and Dorion to form a ministry.  Then occurred the
famous incident in Canadian history known as the Double Shuffle.  The
governor, Sir Edmund Head, refused Brown the privilege of a
dissolution whereby the Reform leader might have obtained a more
substantial majority.  To add to the latter's misfortunes, the
Opposition without giving the Reform ministry a trial carried a vote
of censure.  The new ministry, only a few hours old, was thus forced
out of power, and Cartier and Macdonald were once more called upon.
Constitutional precedent required that the ministers upon accepting
office should seek re-election.  But Macdonald feared that the
ministers from Upper Canada would not be returned, if at this
juncture they faced their constituents.  Hence the ministers by
shuffling their offices made use of a legal technicality to avoid
re-election, and carried on the government as if nothing had occurred
to disturb their former possession of power.

Bitter were the complaints of the Opposition against such juggling.
McGee's voice joined the chorus of denunciation.  He slashed the
Cartier-Macdonald group for pushing difficulties in the path of the
Brown government, and even accused the governor of an unseemly
partiality for Macdonald.  His heavy-fisted criticisms aroused
intense resentment in the government ranks, and every effort was made
to discredit him.  The press was wheeled into the sordid task of
endeavouring to damage his reputation and ruin his public life.  The
Toronto _Leader_ and the _Catholic Witness_ of Montreal were
truceless in their attacks.  Much was made out of the fact that he
had been a fugitive rebel, and the hostile Catholic press endeavoured
to prove that his orthodoxy was in question.  Even an effort was made
to get the board of Catholic bishops to condemn him publicly.
Innuendoes were thrown out that he had some association with a
revolutionary society which threatened the overthrow of Canadian
institutions.  John A. Macdonald was led to describe him as a rebel
in his own country, who had come to Canada to propagate rebellion.
Indeed, the party of Macdonald and Cartier procured a complete file
of McGee's New York _Nation_, in order that they might be able to
taunt him with the revolutionary and anti-British sentiments which he
had expressed between the years 1848 and 1850.

If he had been a man of ordinary ability and troubled with
super-sensitiveness, McGee would not have survived this ordeal of his
first parliamentary year.  But ten years of American journalism had
hardened him sufficiently to go buoyantly and successfully through
the disagreeable rough-and-tumble of Canadian politics.  His rebel
antecedents did not encumber him.  He boldly defended his
revolutionary career in Ireland on the ground that he had rebelled
against conditions which did not exist in Canada, and against which
any Canadian would have rebelled.  As to his position in his new
home, he was emphatic in his profession of faith: "I am as loyal to
the institutions under which I live in Canada as any Tory of the old
or new schools."

Throughout this period he was not always on the side of Brown and the
Opposition stalwarts.  On the important question of the tariff he
voted with the government.  In 1858 Cayley had introduced a budget
with additions to existing duties.  He was bending to the drift of
opinion in favour of protection for the juvenile industries of
Canada, and was also in search of increased revenue.  Galt, who
became finance minister in 1858, was influenced by similar
considerations.  He imposed duties of 20% and 25% on manufactured
goods, with the aim of seeking more public revenue and incidentally
providing protection to Canadian manufacturers.  To George Brown and
his followers who had absorbed the free trade doctrines of British
liberalism Galt's protective principles were heresy.  Brown's organ,
the Toronto _Globe_, thundered against them as pernicious.  But
McGee, a frank protectionist, championed them as necessary for the
development of industrial as well as agrarian activity.  "Where there
were no producing cities as well as consuming cities, there had been
no prosperity--the urban and the rural population must bear some
adequate proportion to each other before security and safety could be
established."  This creed was similar to that preached in the same
period by Horace Greeley in the republic to the south.  It has
continued since to have an influence on Canadian and American
statesmen.

In the four years that McGee sat on the opposition benches, the
gravest question facing the United Canadas was the fate of the union.
Largely on the recommendation of Lord Durham and Lord Sydenham, the
two provinces had been united in 1841.  But, contrary to Durham's
intention, little attempt had been made to merge into one the two
peoples, the French of the lower province and the British of the
upper.  Complete fusion was perhaps impossible.  In any case it had
been made difficult by the provision of the Union Act that equal
representation should be conceded to each province.  The two sections
of the country thus being recognized as distinct units, the members
of the legislature, as representatives of one or the other unit,
contended for sectional advantages.  At the outset the population of
Lower Canada had been larger by 150,000, but in the passage of a few
years the situation was reversed.  The Upper Canadian members now
became sensitive that their province was not receiving benefits
commensurate with their numbers.  In George Brown they had an
eloquent and fearless advocate.  In his opinion, the union was a
complete failure because it did not succeed in creating a united
people.  In addition he considered that it upheld an injustice, for
it allowed one community to govern another more numerous.  His case
was stated emphatically in the _Globe_ "It must be obvious to every
intelligent man that to accomplish the great ends contemplated by the
union, and to draw closer the bonds of sympathy uniting the people of
Canada--it is imperatively necessary that legislation wherever
practicable, shall be for the whole province and not sectional, and
that the local institutions of Upper and Lower Canada shall be
gradually assimilated.  With two languages--two law codes--two
judicial systems--two systems of national instruction--two systems of
municipal government--two systems of land tenure--two systems of
title registration--two systems of mercantile partnership and right
of kin--two systems of relief to solvents--two systems of raising
money for local purposes--two systems in everything--how can we hope
to create a united people?"

Brown's solution was the concession of representation by population.
Through the recognition of this principle the various differences
between the two portions of the province would be sponged out by the
action of the majority in the legislature.  In addition it would
redress the injustice suffered by Upper Canada.  That province in
Brown's estimate had an excess population over Lower Canada of
225,000, and this excess, according to the Reformers, was virtually
unrepresented.  In plain terms majority rule in the Canadas was
impossible and majority interests suffered.  Brown raised the
principle of representation by population into a slogan cry, and no
Highland chief could have been more effective in stirring his
impassioned followers.  The French were as relentless in their
resistance.  They rightly feared that representation by population
would bring a majority of English into the chamber, and their most
cherished interests would be imperilled.  Yet Brown, like a
representative of Fate, in season and out of season drove home his
arguments, and made an ominous deadlock in the legislature.  In 1858,
when McGee entered the chamber, the majority of French under Cartier,
leagued with a minority of British from Upper Canada under Macdonald,
were like a threatening army opposed to the followers of Brown, who
constituted a majority of the Upper Canadians.  The feverish
intensity of Canadian politics at the time was the consequence of
this strained battle to decide whether the union was to fall under
the weight of Brown's attack.  One side added as much bitterness to
the struggle as the other.  On one occasion Cartier stirred up great
irritation by expressing the opinion that the excess population of
Upper Canada had no more right of representation than the numerous
codfish in Gaspé Bay.

What was McGee's position?  He was in the ranks of the Opposition,
but his views on the momentous question of the time did not entirely
square with those of Brown and the Upper Canadian Reformers.  He
admitted the justice of the claim that numbers should be the basis of
representation.  "Property should have its weight, intelligence
should have its weight, but any man who, on this continent and in
this age of the world, did not believe that numbers should be the
basis, was as little to be reasoned with as a man who believed in the
philosopher's stone."  Yet he did not think that a change in the
basis of representation would constitute a permanent solution of the
difficulties of Canadian government.  In October, 1859, he, Dorion,
and two other members of the Lower Canadian opposition, L. T.
Drummond and L. A. Dessaulles, explored carefully the constitutional
problem, and drew up an able report, which has considerable
significance in the light of later events.  They examined in turn the
various suggestions made to relieve the constitutional conflict:
repeal of the union, representation by population, the double
majority.  Repeal of the union was practically impossible.  The
provinces had so many things in common as to make it imperative that
they remain under the same roof.  Representation by population, they
summarily rejected on the ground that it would still leave room for
bitter conflict between the representatives of the respective
provinces over the justice of particular legislation.  They similarly
rejected the double majority, whereby no measure should be considered
as carried until it had not merely a majority of the legislature as a
whole, but also a majority of members from the section of the country
which it affected.  They considered that the double majority would
give rise to confusions, not least of which would be the difficulty
of distinguishing between the cases where it should and should not
apply.  Moreover, the remedy would be worse than the disease, because
it would leave in the chamber two majorities and two minorities.

The true statesmanlike solution in their estimation would be the
substitution of a purely federal for the existing legislative union.
The federal government should have powers defined to such subjects as
were common to the two provinces, leaving supreme jurisdiction in all
other matters to the provincial legislatures.  The committee even
went into some of the details of their suggested system, making it
clear throughout that the pervading idea of the new constitution
should be the delegation of powers from the province to the federal
government.  Everything relating to local affairs, such as education,
administration of justice, and militia should be under provincial
jurisdiction.

This document is symptomatic of McGee's thought.  In the _New Era_,
he had painted the vision of a united British North America, but he
had not, while a journalist, come to close grips with a scheme of
union.  His year of parliamentary experiences had brought him nearer
to constitutional needs, and his co-operation with Dorion in the
projection of a definite plan was the result.  Although he later
departed from the details of this programme, to the principle of
federation he remained faithful.  Such was not the case with Dorion.
It was the irony of his career that the confederation scheme of 1864,
under which Canada grew into lusty young nationhood, found in him its
severest critic.  In the years following 1859 McGee continued as
zealously as before to plead in parliament and on public platforms
the cause of federal union.  He looked even far beyond the mere
federation of the two Canadas.  With an extended foresight he
advocated a union of all the colonies.  In 1860, in the debates on
Brown's resolutions, favouring a federal union of the two
provinces--to which Brown had now turned--McGee argued that much more
desirable would be a union of all the North American provinces.
Common interests demanded it.  The existing arrangement with its
tariff barriers between the colonies hampered trade and economic
development.  Union would widen intercolonial markets and stimulate
the entire material progress of the colonies, while without union
they must lag far behind the United States in the working of their
natural resources.  But federation was imperative for another reason.
It was a necessary means of attaining for the colonies a national
existence.  McGee fervidly looked forward to a day, not distant,
"when we should be known not as Upper or Lower Canadians, Nova
Scotians, or New Brunswickers, but as members of a nation designated
as the Six United Provinces."  The establishment of a federal state
for the nurturing of a British North American nationality was the
shining goal that he held before Canadians.  The wider union would
not merely solve the political difficulties of the Canadas, but would
insure the great destiny of all the colonies.

Canadians of the present take casually the fact that their country
straddles a continent.  They assume that the eastern settlements
expanded through the pressure of population into the prairie country
and beyond; that the spread of Canada westward was as inevitable as
the growth of a sapling into an oak, that nothing else could happen
but what did happen.  Their assumption leaves out of consideration
the effulgent political idealism that entered into the creation of
their country.  It was through the daring spirit of individual men
and their faith in Canada's future that the Dominion was fashioned.
The winning of the West was not the product of mass action, like the
swarming of bees taking possession of a new hive.  The majority of
eastern colonists in the sixties knew nothing of the West, and were
content to remain uninformed on the subject.  A Nova Scotian of the
period would have shaken his head in disbelief had he been told by a
passing stranger that, in little more than fifty years, a city on the
far-away Red River would possess one of the world's largest wheat
exchanges, and that winding freight trains would draw the grain
eastward on its way to the markets of Europe.  The economic
potentialities of the land beyond Lake Superior were a closed book to
the average man.  The school children knew of it only as the land
where the Indian still hung his scalps in his wigwam, and hunted the
buffalo.  Adults read slender references to it in the newspapers with
the mild interest with which their descendants scan the descriptions
of Arctic territories discovered by a Stefansson.  Had the
acquisition of the West depended on popular agitation and action, it
would not have become Canadian, and very likely would have become
part of the American republic.  It was won by the vision and faith of
a few men, prominent among whom was McGee.

He had abundant reasons for western expansion.  Conspicuous among
them was the desire to open up the unexploited prairie lands, where
the indigent members of society in the East might, through their own
effort, find a competence.  For the same reason he had been an ardent
champion of western settlement while residing in the United States.
A more imaginative consideration was that the Canadian territory
might constitute a pathway to the great East, and that thereby the
hopes of early explorers in a north-west passage from Europe to Asia
might be realized.  "We cannot despair," he declared in a speech in
1860, "that the dream of Jacques Cartier may yet be fulfilled, and
the shortest route from Europe to China be found through the valley
of the St. Lawrence."  Some twenty-five years later, the steel lines
of the Canadian Pacific Railway made McGee's dream come true.

Above all, he looked to the acquirement of the West as a subsidiary
means of bringing to birth a new northern nation.  From the outset
his imagination had been fired by this conception.  There was no
better stage on which the experiment of nation-building could be
attempted than the vast territory stretching westward to the Pacific.
The pioneer settlers through a persistent faith and courage cleared
the woods for their seed, and fashioned the farms of the future.  A
like courage on the part of Canadian statesmen would lay in the
north-west territories the foundation of a new nation.  Union of the
colonies, followed by expansion, was the necessary element in the
glorious vision which McGee pictured to an electrified legislature in
the session of 1860: "I look to the future of my adopted country with
hope, though not without anxiety; I see in the not remote distance,
one great nationality bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue
rim of ocean--I see it quartered into many communities--each
disposing of its internal affairs--but all bound together by free
institutions, free intercourse, and free commerce; I see within the
round of that shield, the peaks of the western mountains and the
crests of the eastern waves--the winding Assiniboine, the five-fold
lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Saguenay, the St. John, and
the Basin of Mines--by all these flowing waters, in all the valleys
they fertilize, in all the cities they visit in their courses, I see
a generation of industrious, contented, moral men, free in name and
in fact--men capable of maintaining, in peace and in war, a
constitution worthy of such a country."

Early in 1861, an event occurred which added force to McGee's
advocacy of British-American union.  In the gloom of an April
morning, the guns of the confederate troops outside Fort Sumter
boomed their first discharge, and the American civil war began.
During the next five years a titanic struggle was waged in the
republic.  The issues and nature of this war might seem of little
interest to the British colonists.  They were sufficiently remote
from the stage of conflict.  Yet few events in the century so
quickened and shaped development in the British communities as this.
McGee was quick to see its implications.  "That shot fired at Fort
Sumter, on the 12th of April, 1861, had a message for the north as
well as for the south....  That shot fired at Fort Sumter was the
signal gun of a new epoch for North America, which told the people of
Canada, more plainly than human speech can express it, to sleep no
more except on their arms."  The civil war made the northern states a
military power, and whatever turn the struggle might take the British
colonies were in danger from aggressive action.  If the federal
government failed to conquer the South, it might, as some politicians
urged, obtain compensation by absorbing the British possessions.
Even in case of victory the spirit of military aggression might so
control northern statesmen as to lead to the conquest of Canada.

From the beginning of the war a very active newspaper campaign had
been going on against Canada, led by the New York _Herald_, a paper
which represented the opinions of Seward, Secretary of State.
Significantly also it had the largest circulation of any journal in
the United States.  It declared emphatically that Canada
geographically was an annex to the Republic, and that, if an army
were sent there, its inhabitants would at once declare their
independence of Britain.  After the _Trent_ affair of 1861, when two
southern gentlemen were removed from the British steamer _Trent_ by
federal sailors, these annexationist opinions found more heated
expression.  McGee, who kept in close touch with American opinion,
became acutely aware of Canada's danger.  On every available
occasion, he publicly pleaded that preparation be made for defence
and the most essential preparation was colonial union.  The situation
demonstrated Æsop's fable of the sticks.  In a bundle they were
unbreakable, but asunder they could be snapped with ease.  He was
convinced that the colonies had reached the cross-roads of their
destiny.  The pressure of events across their frontiers and their own
political development brought them face to face with a number of
alternatives, one of which must be chosen.  They must either (1)
strengthen themselves as members of the Empire by union amongst
themselves; (2) become independent states and face the perils of such
a situation; or (3) agree to be absorbed in the United States and
lose their individuality as British-American communities.

McGee argued that the time was ripe for the first alternative.  "The
eventful opportunity for British America is now; the tide in our
affairs is at the flood."  Union would satisfy the most extended
aspiration of the colonists, for through it they could march out of
their petty colonial existence to the status of a nation, "in
perpetual alliance with the Empire, under which it had its rise and
growth."  At the same time, he was emphatic in his description of the
kind of nation to be nurtured.  "A Canadian nationality, not
French-Canadian, nor British-Canadian, nor Irish-Canadian--patriotism
rejects the prefix--that is, in my opinion, what we should look
forward to,--that is what we ought to labour for, that is what we
ought to be prepared to defend to the death."

Such was the compelling cause which McGee as a member of the
Opposition championed in parliament and on public platforms.  In the
_New Era_, he had sketched it in outline.  Now as a political leader
he carefully shaded in the outlines, and presented a compact case.
The enthusiasm which as a Young Irelander he had bestowed on the
ideal of Irish freedom, he now devoted to the service of this new
cause.  Others had caught a similar vision.  Alexander Morris, an
Upper Canadian, in March, 1858, delivered a lecture in Montreal
entitled _Nova Britannia_, describing the potential resources of the
British colonies and projecting the plan of a future union which
would make those colonies a great nation.  A few public men of the
period spoke frequently of the national future of the colonies, but
upon the mind of none had the idea fastened so firmly as upon
McGee's.  Not merely did he vividly grasp the ideal, he voiced it
with impelling beauty of speech.  In him the Canadian nation had its
first prophet.




CHAPTER IV

IN OFFICE AND OUT OF IT

May 22, 1862, the Cartier-Macdonald government fell.  Its career came
to grief on a militia bill which provided for the maintenance of a
force of 50,000 men, at all times available for active service, at a
cost of about one million dollars.  The danger to the provinces
consequent upon the events of war in the United States had forced the
government to stake its existence upon such a far-reaching scheme of
defence.  But the defection of some Lower Canadian supporters threw
out the measure, and the government resigned.  Foley, the Reform
leader, was passed over, and the governor called upon Sandfield
Macdonald to form an administration.  In co-operation with Sicotte,
the Reform leader in Lower Canada, he patched together a ministry
which held office for approximately one year, and was known as the
Macdonald-Sicotte government.  It contained the leading figures of
the Opposition: James Morris, A. A. Dorion, M. H. Foley, W.
McDougall, W. P. Howland, and McGee.  The presidency of the council
was conferred on McGee.

The programme of the new administration had in it a dash of boldness.
It included militia and bankruptcy bills, plans towards opening for
settlement the great north-western territories, and the determination
to set the building of the intercolonial railway on the move.  Many
of these measures McGee gladly welcomed as steps towards the
establishment of that for which he laboured, the great new northern
nation.  But that stern reformer, George Brown, found one grave
omission in this scheme of legislation.  Sandfield Macdonald flatly
refused to carry into effect the principle so sacred to the editor of
the _Globe_, representation by population.  He was personally
doubtful of its value as a medicine for Canadian ills, and he felt
that the line of least difficulty would be to leave it alone.  In its
place he adopted as the hinge principle of the government's action,
the double majority, begging that it be given a fair trial.  But
Brown was not satisfied.  In his mind the Reform party existed
primarily to establish representation by population.  A ministry that
failed to accomplish this was no reform government.  "Better a
thousand times," thundered the _Globe_, "had it been that the
Cartier-Macdonald government with all its wickedness should have been
recalled than that so many leading men of the Liberal Opposition
should have sacrificed their principles and destroyed the moral
influence which they justly possessed with the electors of Upper
Canada."  Such hostility was unveiled, although Brown alleged that he
was willing to give the government a chance.  His lack of
friendliness was ominous, and the fall of the ministry a year later
was largely due to the fact that George Brown had failed to give it
his blessing.

What was the attitude of McGee?  He slipped into office with the
determination to perform something for the cause which he had
advanced by voice and pen, the development of a British-American
nationality.  Varied elements entered the task of nation-building.
More was necessary than the territorial union of the colonies,
although that was imperative.  In a sparse community, flattened out
over a new and vast country, an impelling need was the encouragement
of immigration.  The body of a nation was in its sturdy farmers and
dauntless pioneers.  Men were required to labour in field and mine.
The Canadas from the eastern to the western frontier had thousands of
acres of rich farming lands awaiting the plough.  The wealth of the
fisheries and mineral resources were no less great, and all these
invited labour.  This fact McGee keenly realized, and to the task of
colonization he bent his attention.  In his election speech at
Montreal in June, 1862, he declared that in the ministry "all that he
would ask to be judged by was this--what had he done for the
settlement of the country?  This was his great political principle,
all others in his estimation being secondary."  Canadian
statesmanship, he believed, must be tested by the success with which
it endeavoured to build a great community out of a small one.
Careful settlement was the readiest means to this end.  In the past
three years McGee had done much to promote an interest in settlement.
In each of the previous sessions he had obtained a committee to
examine the problem of immigration.  The committee of 1860 submitted
a careful report with many recommendations.  It drew attention to the
fact that the advantages of Canada as a field of colonization had not
been brought home to the popular mind of Europe.  During the season
of 1859 there arrived in the country by the St. Lawrence, not more
than 6,000 English-speaking persons.  In the same year New York
received 45,000.  There were many obvious reasons for this disparity.
The development of industrial life in the United States gave the
inducement of higher wages.  Canada, being almost purely an
agricultural country, could not offer the same wages, and
incidentally the committee recommended that manufactures be
encouraged to widen the appeal to prospective immigrants.  But McGee
and his committee emphasized in particular the need of spreading
information concerning Canada's strongest attraction to the European
emigrant, cheap or free cultivable land.  They pressed the necessity
of an intimate co-operation between the immigrant service and the
Crown lands' department in order that immigrant authorities be kept
cognizant with all the lands available.  The lack of such
co-operation in the past had seriously handicapped the settlement of
the country.

The committee also laid importance upon the building of a suitable
landing place for immigrants with convenient sheds and wash houses in
the port of Quebec on the general plan of the establishment at Castle
Garden, New York.  A further recommendation, carried into effect, was
that resident provincial agents be appointed at convenient places in
Europe, such as Christiania, Hamburg, Liverpool, an Irish port, and
also New York.  At such strategic points information and guidance
might be given to prospective emigrants, and their faces directed to
the Canadas.  The report of 1861 backed up these recommendations with
others of a similar kind.  In the spring of 1862, before assuming
office, McGee again brought the question of colonization before
parliament and "in the spirit of a broad, uncircumscribed Canadian
patriotism, which knows in this House, in any legislative light,
neither race, nor religion, nor language, but only Canada, and her
advancement," moved for another committee.  The committee was
appointed, but in this year it lacked McGee's enthusiastic
chairmanship.  His ministerial duties kept him otherwise occupied.

When the ministry was being formed, he had hoped to get the
Department of Agriculture, which included immigration, the subject in
which he had most interest.  Political considerations thwarted this
hope, but on being given the presidency of the council he was
promised that the immigration bureau should come under his
department.  The promise was not fulfilled, largely because of the
opposition of Lower Canada.  The French-Canadian members feared that
a vigorous immigration policy would, through the inrush of
immigrants, swamp the French-Canadian community with English-speaking
people.  _L'Ordre_, a leading French Catholic organ in Montreal,
stated that "McGee's avowed liberality, which looked upon all nations
and creeds alike, would fit him for minister of immigration for Upper
Canada, but totally disqualify him for that office in Lower Canada."
Such agitation was successful.  It restrained Sandfield Macdonald
from granting McGee control over the immigration service.  It did
more.  Much to McGee's annoyance, it checked the government of which
he was a member from doing anything to carry into effect the
recommendations which his committees had suggested.  Even the
emigration agents in England and Ireland were withdrawn, and new ones
not appointed.  No event of the period gave McGee such chagrin.  It
seemed to him that the ministers were juggling with the most vital
subject affecting the country's growth.

A work no less significant than immigration in the creation of a "new
northern nation" was railway construction, and in its advocacy McGee
was quite as ardent.  Nature had endowed the British colonies of
North America with a magnificent road system.  In the seventeenth
century the French settlements in Canada had clustered round the St.
Lawrence and Richelieu rivers, and these winding watercourses
constituted the one bond of communication.  The United Empire
Loyalists later erected their log houses along the wooded shores of
the lakes and rivers further west, and the St. Lawrence waterway was
their means of contact with Quebec and Britain.  Without the St.
Lawrence the Canadas would have broken in two like a bridge without
piers.  But one gift Nature failed to bestow on the British colonies.
She provided no easy means of transit between the Canadian and
Maritime provinces.  Mountain spurs with dense forests constituted an
almost impenetrable wall, blocking overland travel between the two
groups of British colonies.  The sea-route through the Gulf was
tediously long, and was closed by ice part of the year.  It was
clear, as Lord Durham in 1838 had recognized with quick insight, that
political association between the colonies must await the building of
a railway cutting through the mountain and forest area and bringing
Quebec closer to Halifax.  In the years following Durham, the
aspiration for such a line grew among the more far-sighted of
colonial statesmen.  It was considered as a necessary basis not
merely for colonial union, but for colonial prosperity.  The Maritime
provinces were in need of it to reap the benefits of trade with the
Canadian and American west, and to forge a commercial route which
would make their harbours the winter ports of the northern part of
the continent.  The Canadas no less required it in order that they
might have access to the Atlantic frontage of British North America,
and find consumers for their produce amongst the seamen of the lower
provinces.

The attempts to build an intercolonial line have a lengthy and
chequered history.  In 1850 Joseph Howe, Nova Scotia's distinguished
champion of responsible government, obtained an imperial guarantee to
support the colonies in financing the project, but the plan collapsed
on account of irreconcilable opinions as to what route the line
should take.  In the following years negotiations continued, but a
dismal succession of circumstances made them sterile.  What the
provincial governments failed to perform, private enterprise in part
attempted.  The Grand Trunk Company took the field, and pushed its
lines west and east.  But the vision of a truly intercolonial line
was not lost.  The need of it, to relieve Canada's dependence on
American ports, increased in urgency.  In 1857 the Canadian
government, co-operating with Nova Scotia, again pressed the question
on the attention of the imperial authorities, but without results.
Nothing daunted, the Macdonald-Sicotte government resumed the
project, and McGee was its warmest advocate.  To him the railway was
an instrument of creative statesmanship.  "The construction of the
intercolonial railway would have the effect of inducing a union of
the colonies and making them one in interest and importance, whereas
now they were but isolated, lone, undistinguished provinces."

In the Quebec conference of 1862, the first of the important colonial
conferences, he drew up in company with Howe of Nova Scotia and
Tilley of New Brunswick a memorandum concerning its construction and
management.  It was agreed that "if it should be concluded that the
work shall be constructed and managed by a joint commission of the
three provinces, it shall be constructed in the proportion of two
appointed by the government of Canada, and one each by the
governments of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the four to select a
fifth before entering upon the discharge of their duties."  It was
also planned that Canada should assume five-twelfths of the risk of
construction, the provinces by the sea dividing up the other
seven-twelfths between them.  Intercolonial free-trade was to follow
at once on the making of the railway.  But the scheme, like its
predecessors, came to grief.  For its adoption, the financial backing
of the imperial government was imperative, and to obtain it Sicotte
and Howland went to England.  But British ministers would give a
financial guarantee only on such conditions as would render it in the
opinion of Sicotte of no advantage to the colonial governments
concerned, and the Canadians returned empty-handed.  The possibility
of sinking money in the inter-colonial also led to disagreement
within the government party.  In hostility to the project Dorion in
January, 1863, left the ministry.  This confluence of adverse
circumstances forced the administration to discard its intention of
carrying through the much desired intercolonial line, much to McGee's
regret.  Little more was gained than the extension of the survey
which proved useful in subsequent years.  The most important step
attempted by the ministry in hastening the emergence of the new
nationality was thus halted.

A thorny issue which had much to do with the fate of the
Macdonald-Sicotte ministry was that of separate schools.  Early in
the history of the Canadas a common school system had arisen which
recognized no religious distinctions among those seeking education.
The money of all taxpayers went to the maintenance of the system.
But, in 1841, an Act allowed public support to denominational
schools, and to such institutions Roman Catholic parents sent their
children.  The separate school principle was developed by later Acts
in 1843, 1852, and 1855.  Yet many Roman Catholics considered that
the status given to their schools was inadequate.  In 1860, 1861, and
1862, R. W. Scott of Ottawa introduced legislation to strengthen the
Roman Catholic separate school system of Upper Canada.  On each
occasion he found a warm supporter in McGee.  Indeed, in his first
election address, in 1857, McGee had chosen this subject for his
special championship.  It was the one large issue on which he
differed radically from Brown, and he was ever frank that in it he
would not compromise.  He made clear his views.  "If you permit the
state to form the minds of the young apart from parental or religious
control, why not allow the same state to establish a uniformity of
belief and worship for the old.  The same pretension which justifies
the state school will justify a state church."  For youth the moral
guidance received under the impress of religious teaching was
invaluable.  "In Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, do they launch men
upon the voyage of life without a strong infusion of dogmatic
religion--without a standard of right and wrong--without an ethical
compass by which they may tell the moral north from the moral south?"
The logical corollary from which he did not shrink was that all sects
should have their separate schools.  The followers of Brown viewed
such a doctrine with dismay.  To them the common school was the least
expensive and the most likely to alloy sectarian feeling.  The
_Globe_ lucidly stated their case.  "We need the common school system
more than New England to blend into one homogeneous people all these
races of men.  Carry out Mr. McGee's ideas, and we shall never
accomplish that.  We shall be a nation of sects fighting for
supremacy; a people backward, unintelligent, unenterprising."

Notwithstanding the hostility of Upper Canadians to the principle of
separate schools, Scott's bill, in 1863, became law.  Due largely to
McGee's influence, it was carried as a government measure.  This was
fatal to the ministry.  Although Scott's Act affected only Upper
Canada, it was carried against the heated opposition of a majority
from that province.  The principle of the double majority, to which
Sandfield Macdonald had pinned his colours, was flagrantly ignored,
and Brown with his followers had an ample opportunity to sing
condemnations.  The government's action was a confession that its
much proclaimed principle could not always be applied, and that, as a
solvent of political difficulties, it was useless.

The Macdonald-Sicotte government never survived this shock to its
pretensions.  In May, 1863, J. A. Macdonald moved and Cartier
seconded a motion condemning the ministry, and it was carried by a
majority of five.  "We shall not," declared the Globe, "cry our eyes
out over the defeat of the ministry, whatever the result be....  If
it is destroyed now by its enemies, we may rejoice that the
executioner's task has been taken out of our hands."  But the
administration did not immediately die.  Sandfield Macdonald
endeavoured to save it by a purgation, and the infusion of fresh
blood.  A reorganization of the cabinet took place, with the obvious
aim of making it more acceptable to Brown and Upper Canada.  Sicotte
was quietly dropped, and Dorion took his place as leader of the Lower
Canadians and partner with Macdonald.  McGee, Foley, and Abbott were
gently pushed out.  McGee was removed to make way for a person more
favourable in the eyes of Upper Canada, but many of the prime
minister's supporters considered his removal a serious mistake.  The
_Globe_, which blessed the ministerial changes, considered that McGee
had not obtained a fair deal.  To himself, the event was one of the
most painful in his public career.  Of all men he was least covetous
for office as subsequent events proved, but he craved the confidence
of those with whom he acted.  Sandfield Macdonald withheld such
confidence, and never adequately explained to him why he was being
removed from the ministry.  The cards were shuffled behind his back.
In any case the affair was momentous, for it jostled him from the
ranks of the Reformers and henceforth he tended to direct his support
to J. A. Macdonald and Cartier.

In the early summer of 1863 the new Macdonald-Dorion government
appealed to the country.  Lacking robust strength, its members laid
no very great emphasis upon the principles for which they stood.  But
one significant pronouncement was ventured to the effect that the
ministry would consider representation by population as an open
question.  This alone was sufficient to win Brown who promised to
wield his lance for the new government.  The election gave Sandfield
Macdonald a majority in Upper Canada, but in the lower province his
followers were thinned to a minority.  In Montreal three of the
ministers went down to defeat, Young, Holton, and Dorion.  This fact
the _Globe_ attributed to the dropping of McGee.  The elections
altered only slightly the political situation.  The government had
not increased its voting strength, and it therefore lacked the
vitality to carry through vigorous legislation.  The evil of
political deadlock remained like a running sore.  Thoughtful men
still shook their heads at a hopeless situation, and those with
vision looked forward with more earnestness than ever to some great
constructive measure that would bring salvation to Canadian politics.

McGee made his departure from the ranks of reformers the occasion of
a dramatic utterance in the press.  In June 1863 he wrote a public
letter to a friend, Daniel Macarow, of Kingston, proclaiming his
devotion to those principles cherished by Conservatives and
expressing his fear of democracy.  He believed that the surest
antidote to the instability and rashheadedness associated with
democratic government would be the establishment of a royal prince,
and the nurturing in Canada as in England of the monarchical
principle.  He was confident that a monarchy would save colonial
society from the excesses that seemed to be the natural irruptions of
democratic communities.  In the light of subsequent development,
there is something a little bizarre about McGee's suggestion that a
monarch be imported to the British colonies.  But in the sixties it
was not as chimerical as might now appear.  The political future of
the colonies was then obscure.  Popular institutions worked in such a
manner as to inspire despair in the minds of the critical.  Partisan
spirit was violent in its bitterness.  Political morality, seldom
very high on the American continent, was at a low ebb.  The restless
spirit of self-interest, a powerful agent in promoting the
development of a new country, expressed itself in actions predatory
to the community.  The outbreak of the American civil war seemed to
rock institutions throughout the continent, and accentuate the sense
of insecurity.  It was natural that McGee should look abroad for some
means of bringing stability to Canadian institutions, and he was
merely following a time-worn precedent in believing that a monarchy
was a stabilizing force.  All the prominent fathers of Confederation
held a similar opinion, although McGee stood alone in his plea that
the monarch should definitely live within Canada.  His letter had no
very practical results.  It was little more than a gesture,
transitory in its effects, but sufficiently significant at the time
to arouse controversy.

For some ten months the Macdonald-Dorion government stumbled along
under accumulating difficulties.  Without a substantial majority it
could venture on no bold legislation, and its efforts were mainly
concerned with staving off defeat.  McGee attacked it with as much
fire as any member of the Opposition.  He was merciless in his
treatment of Sandfield Macdonald.  The premier on one occasion
taunted him with his rebel past, and McGee replied with a polished
sarcasm that held the house spellbound.  "Although there may have
been imprudence and many errors in the early career of one who was an
editor at seventeen, and a public speaker before I was of age, and
although there have been many things that my own judgment at this day
does not approve, at all events, throughout the whole long road, and
it remains for the most part in irrevocable type, the honourable
member will find no art of duplicity, he will find no instance in
which I betrayed a friend or intrigued against an associate.  I have
not been fair to men's faces and false behind their back.  I have not
condoled with sinister sympathy with the friends of a public man whom
I desired to injure, while at the same time I placed in the hands of
his enemies weapons of attack, forged by malice, and poisoned by
slanderous personalities."  The words do little to recapture the
intense atmosphere of the chamber, the young man with pale face and
flashing eyes, and the piercing soprano voice which carried the
barbed phrases to every listening ear.  An observer, E. R. Cameron,
wrote that "the members upon the floor, and the spectators in the
galleries, were .... almost breathless during the delivery, and the
merciless flogging of the Premier excited the same feelings as would
be aroused in a gladiatorial combat, in which one party, by the most
exquisite thrusts, is done slowly to death."  Notwithstanding the
criticisms of McGee and others, the government staggered on until,
like a spent runner, it resigned in March, 1864.  Another _impasse_
was reached.

After the usual political manœuvres Sir Etienne Taché, with the
assistance of J. A. Macdonald, put together a new ministry in which
the chief members were Taché, Macdonald, Cartier, Galt, Foley, and
McGee.  McGee became minister of agriculture, an office in which his
chief interest rested, in virtue of its intimate contact with the
work of nation-building through colonization.  The ministry had the
same jagged path to follow as its predecessors.  With a slender
majority, it worked under the shadow of defeat.  It could obviously
venture on no bold policies, and it was forced to shrink from
clear-cut issues.  Eventually, on June 14, it fell, the fourth
ministry within four years.  The situation had become baffling beyond
description.  It mattered not in what manner the political groups
paired and allied, deadlock continued, like an evil spirit, to stalk
the career of each administration.  Political ingenuity exhausted
itself without avail.  Appeals to the electorate brought no wholesome
results.  The continuance of party conflict merely accentuated the
difficulties.  Where was the solution?  The solution indeed had long
been advocated by McGee and others.  But it was now pressed forward
by a stronger force than advocacy, by the intense gravity of the
political situation.  George Brown, with an honesty of purpose that
should make his name for ever remembered among Canadians, came
forward to declare that the time had come for establishing a new
system by a union of all parties.  His demand constitutes the real
beginning of the federal movement consummated three years later.

Early in October, 1863, Brown and McGee had consulted over the
difficulties of the existing constitution, and Brown was disposed to
approve of a federal union of the Canadas.  McGee promised his
support to any motion which Brown might introduce on the subject.
Hence on October 12, Brown introduced a famous resolution asking for
the appointment of a committee to report on the constitutional
difficulties with the purpose of finding a way out.  The motion was
temporarily withdrawn, but was reintroduced on March 14.  Weeks again
elapsed without anything being done, and throughout this period
Brown's motion encountered the stern opposition of Cartier and
Macdonald, while McGee was its warm champion, seeing in it the
possibility of getting a federal system on the anvil.  The committee
was finally appointed, McGee and Brown being its two most prominent
members.  On June 13, the day previous to the fall of the Taché
government, it reported in favour of a federation.  The fall of the
administration precipitated events.  Brown's suggestion was now
gladly accepted, and the formation of a coalition for the carrying of
constitutional changes was agreed upon.

Difficulties strewed the path of forming a coalition.  Men who had
assailed one another with the bitterness of fishmongers could combine
only with diffidence.  Moreover, feeling in the country was
lethargic.  Yet, by the close of June, the administration was formed.
The Reformers, Messrs. George Brown, Oliver Mowat, and William
McDougall were sworn in as ministers, and eagerly looked forward to
their task.  Their procedure was shaped for them by events which
matured quickly in the Maritime provinces.  The need for union among
the colonies by the sea had become so imperative that their leaders
determined on holding a convention at Charlottetown on September I,
for the purpose of fashioning a federal scheme.  Fate in her kindest
mood could not have given a better opportunity to Canadian statesmen.
Why should not the prospective union between Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island include the Canadas?  The dream
of a united British North America, which had long dazzled the
imagination of McGee and others, pushed itself to the fore.  The
plastic moment had come.  Now was the time to shape the destiny of
the British possessions.  Fortunately men were in the Canadas ready
to snatch opportunity by the forelock.  Eight members of the
ministry, including McGee, departed to Charlottetown to discuss
federal union with the leaders of the lower provinces.  They were
successful in their mission.  The statesmen of the Maritime colonies
were convinced that the wider union was preferable, and to construct
it they agreed to meet at Quebec in the early days of October.

In the months previous to the historic Charlottetown conference,
McGee had championed his cherished cause, not merely in the
legislature, but in the press and on the platform.  The case for
confederation had, in all the provinces, no greater publicity agent.
In the _British American Magazine_ for August and October, 1863, he
eloquently pleaded that the British North American provinces should
insure their future by immediate union.  With the faith of Mrs.
Browning that nations are what they will, he believed that all
obstacles would dissolve before the determination of the colonists.
"We are between the Gulf Stream and the Rocky Mountains--British
subjects--professing monarchists almost to a man--four millions.  Are
these too few to form a decision on their political future?  Our
joint revenues within that range exceed those of the respectable
kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, Bavaria, Portugal, and Saxony.  Our
joint civil lists far exceed the cost of the royal governments of
those ancient and considerable nations, cramped as they are, where we
are boundless in point of territory.  It is clear, then, that it is
listlessness of will--not lack of means or numbers--which heretofore
has prevented us taking up in a practical shape the alternative of
the fate before us--the establishment of our future, complete, and
permanent constitution."

The reasons for immediate action were those he had adduced in
previous years.  There was the elemental need of defence.  The
colonies disunited could not defend themselves, nor could they be
expected to fight for one another when they had nothing in common.
They cherished British institutions, but these they could not long
maintain without union.  The force of American example was too great.
Moreover, their economic development must inevitably lag behind that
of the states to the south, unless they united to confer upon one
another the benefits of reciprocal trade and mutual assistance.  Of
no less importance was the fact that only through confederation could
the colonies shoulder the responsibilities which necessarily clung to
them as communities with self-government as an ideal.  It was not
merely in their own interests that they should do so, but in the
interests of the mother state.  "We have passed out of the stage of
pupilage, and we have not emerged into the stage of partnership."
The intermediary stage, in McGee's estimation, failed to develop an
adequate sense of responsibility among the colonists, while it
imposed on the imperial state the unfair burden of defence.

But mere reasons for union were not sufficient.  The march of
development depended upon another factor.  A vital union of any kind
presupposed a common sympathy and understanding, and these could be
created only by intercourse.  The colonists by the sea and those of
the Canadas lived under similar institutions, and were of the same
racial stock.  But they had little intercourse; they were as divided
as if they lived on different continents.  The inhabitants of Nova
Scotia looked upon Canadians with almost as much distrust as they
would view the natives of the South Seas.  Business relations might
have done much to dissipate this feeling, but the drift of trade from
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick was southward.  Halifax had more
commerce with Boston than with Quebec, which lay away to the west,
and was too distant for intimacy.  McGee, who had travelled in all
the colonies and felt as much at home at the friendly firesides of
Halifax as in Montreal, pleaded continually for closer relationship.
It was essential for that future nationality which he ever saw in the
horizon.  He expended energy and time to effect the closer contact.
Each year since 1859, he had visited the Maritime provinces, pleading
on every occasion for closer association.  In the hot days of August,
1863, he was in Halifax and St. John, painting vivid pictures of the
possibilities in colonial union, and championing the completion of
the intercolonial railway as a means to union.  "Your destiny and
ours," he told the people of St. John, "is as inseparable as are the
waters which pour into the Bay of Chaleur, rising though they do, on
the one hand on the Canadian, and on the other on the New Brunswick
Highlands.  Geographically we are bound up beyond the power of
extinction."

In the mid-summer of 1864, he attempted something more than a
personal tour.  With Sandford Fleming, then chief engineer of the
intercolonial survey, he planned an elaborate excursion of one
hundred leading men from the Canadas.  Members of parliament, the
professions, and business men were represented.  The boards of trade
in St. John and Halifax welcomed the deputation, banquets were held,
speeches delivered, and the Canadian representatives found through
the fellowship of knife and fork how much they had in common with
their fellow colonists of the lower provinces.  McGee made use of the
occasion to plead passionately for federation.  The reporter of the
_Canadien_, who accompanied the excursion, stated that at Fredericton
McGee surpassed himself in his plea for united action.  At Halifax,
he declared that if the colonies "remained long as fragments, we
shall be lost; but let us be united, and we shall be as a rock which,
unmoved itself, flings back the waves that may be dashed upon it by
the storm."  His eloquent campaigning, combined with the social
intercourse provided by the excursion, undoubtedly did much to make
successful the discussions at Charlottetown in the following
September.

Throughout this period, he endeavoured to advance not merely those
material readjustments, such as territorial union, necessary for the
creation of a new nationality.  With no less enthusiasm, he sought to
cultivate sympathy and fellowship between all groups, sects, and
parties--the essential basis for a nation.  Dissension between the
Roman Catholics and Protestants had long rent the Canadas, and McGee
from the outset of his residence in Montreal had striven to heal it,
frequently at the cost of friction with prominent men of his own
church and race who feared that he was compromising their interests.
In the period, Toronto was the chief hotbed of sectarian strife.  The
parades there on St. Patrick's Day had generally ended in rioting and
sometimes in bloodshed.  McGee poured oil on the troubled waters.  He
persuaded the Catholic body to forego their parades, out of
consideration for public harmony, and also induced them to cease
printing a rather vituperative organ, known as the _Citizen_.  In its
place he substituted the _Freeman_, a journal, ably conducted, which
championed McGee's policy of conciliation, and did much to bring
about harmonious relationships between the Catholic and Protestant
sects.  With equal fervour he sought to break down the fatal inertia
which lay like a mountain upon colonial leaders.  In Halifax in 1863,
he declared that "if we were ever to have a spirit of patriotism
amongst us such as Englishmen manifest with respect to England, and
Frenchmen to France, if we are to feel that we have a country, and
that it is our country, we must obliterate all sectional lines, and
overcome all party and local prejudices, and if in so doing
difficulties present themselves, we must conquer them and assert our
mastery over all obstacles."  It was an admirable creed for those who
looked to Confederation as the supreme goal for the colonies.




CHAPTER V

CONFEDERATION AND FENIANISM

On the 10th of October, 1864, the historic Quebec conference met.  It
was a fitting time and a fitting place for the constructive work of
colonial statesmen.  October is the final harvest month of the
Canadian year.  The fruits and crops of the summer are garnered, and
in no place does nature celebrate the event with more gorgeous
colouring than in Quebec.  Amid the magic charm and beauty of French
Canada's old capital, the conference undertook the arduous labour of
carrying into execution the visions of the previous years.  McGee's
feelings on the occasion were vivid.  The cause which he had so
faithfully championed and the hopes which he had so long cherished
were now to triumph.  The new nationality for whose emergence he had
laboured was to be fitted with a constitution.

The story of the painstaking sessions of the conference belongs to
the general history of Confederation, and need not be chronicled.  In
the debates and fashioning of resolutions, McGee's part was less
prominent than that of many men who had not laboured as much in the
heat of the day.  His one recorded motion was to secure the
preservation of denominational schools.  He moved that to the clause
which assigned education to the control of the local legislatures be
added the words, "saving the rights and privileges which the
Protestant or Catholic minority in both Canadas may possess as to
their denominational schools at the time when the constitutional act
goes into operation".  Throughout the discussions he watched with
jealous care the maintenance of minority and local rights, and made
the significant confession the following February in defending the
Quebec resolutions before the Canadian parliament: "If we had failed
to secure every possible constitutional guarantee for minorities,
east and west .... I myself could have been no party to the
conclusions of the late conference.  But .... in securing the power
of disallowance, under circumstances, which might warrant it, to the
general government, in giving the appointment of judges and local
governors to the general government, and in expressly providing in
the constitution for the educational rights of the minority, we had
taken every possible guarantee ... against the oppression of a
sectional minority by a sectional majority."

By the close of the month the conference had brought its labours to a
conclusion.  Its seventy-two resolutions embodied the framework of
confederation.  The remaining task was to obtain the confirmation of
the various colonial legislatures, and in the following February the
resolutions came before the Canadian parliament.  Provided that the
coalition of party leaders held together, their acceptance was
assured.  The debate was none the less critical.  The ministers had
to justify the resolutions not merely before parliament, but before
Canadian public opinion.  To render their work difficult Dorion and
Sandfield Macdonald stirred up an animated opposition, and some
feared that the coalition might break.  The government's case for
union was contained in five masterly speeches by Macdonald, Cartier,
Brown, Galt, and McGee.  Whatever might be the outstanding position
of Brown and Macdonald as political leaders wheeling the party
machines to make confederation possible, the most vivid orator of the
projected Dominion was McGee.  "When he rose to speak," said a
reporter in the press gallery, "there was the greatest temptation to
throw down my pencil and just listen."  Fired by the event to the
white heat of enthusiasm, he delivered one of his most powerful
orations, infused with the imagination and glowing rhetoric of his
best performances.  He enumerated the military and political reasons
for confederation which in the previous eight years he had steadily
pleaded.  The prospective commercial benefits of union were
patent--free access to the sea, an extended market, the breaking down
of hostile tariffs, and enhanced credit with England.  Nothing short
of a confederation would bring such advantages.  A Zollverein or
commercial union would not satisfy.  "If any one for a moment will
remember that the trade of the whole front of New Brunswick and Nova
Scotia gravitates at present alongshore to Portland and Boston, while
the trade of Upper Canada, west of Kingston, has long gravitated
across the lakes to New York, he will see, I think, that a mere
Zollverein treaty without a strong political end to serve, and some
political power at its back, would be in our new circumstances merely
waste paper."

He argued that the political reasons for union were no less
imperative: the need of ending the fatal deadlock in the Canadas, the
responsibility that rested on the colonies for the shouldering of
some imperial burdens, and the immeasurable benefits that would
accrue to all the colonies in pooling their common resources and
working for common ends.  With the inspiring vision of the new
nationality, he looked forward to the attainment of a mental union,
in which public men from all the colonies might rise from the
cramping restraints of local politics and parish business to the
expanding affairs of a growing nation.  None the less he did not
presume that colonial union would weaken the imperial tie.  On the
contrary, it would strengthen it, and through it the British North
American nationality would be kept in contact with European
civilization.

As in his former address McGee emphasized the argument of defence.
"I said in this House, during the session of the year 1861, that the
first gun fired at Fort Sumter had a message for us.  I was unheeded
then; I repeat now that every one of the 2700 guns in the field, and
every one of the 4600 guns afloat, whenever it opens its mouth,
repeats the solemn warning of England--prepare."  Intimate
observation of American politics had convinced McGee that aggression
from the United States was an imminent danger, and the confederation
of the colonies was the best precautionary measure of defence.  He
was confident that the terms of the constitution fashioned by the
Quebec Conference satisfied colonial needs, and was "eminently
favourable to liberty, because local affairs are left to be dealt
with by local bodies and cannot be interfered with by those who have
no local interest in them, while matters of a general character are
left exclusively to a general government".

After the stormy battle of a month, the resolutions were carried.
The Canadas had accepted the projected confederation.  But McGee did
not relax his efforts to enlighten public opinion on the issue.  In
the same year he published a little book, _Notes on Federal
Governments Past and Present_, outlining for colonial readers the
experiments in federal government from the Aetolian and Achaian
leagues of ancient Greece to the New Zealand confederation.  He also
published a collection of speeches on British American union, which
remain the most substantial evidence of how earnestly and ably he had
pleaded his cherished cause.  But it was chiefly from the platform
that he shaped the public mind.  His oratory had now reached an
impressive maturity, and the reminiscences of all who heard him at
the time agree as to the charm and power of his spoken words.

Sir George Ross related vividly how as a young school teacher in 1865
he was thrilled by McGee's speech at London, Ontario, on the future
of British North America.  His impressions bring before one the
living McGee, as he appeared to Canadian audiences in the period of
confederation.  "After a ride of fifteen miles on a summer evening, I
found myself in front of one of the greatest orators of the day.  I
had never heard or seen Mr. McGee before that day--or since.  I am
not sure that I had even read any of his speeches, unless it might
have been in the condensed reports of the debates in Parliament.  I
had no preconception of oratory as a fine art or what were its
essential elements....  But whatever it was, I was there to see and
learn for myself.  My first reflection as McGee rose to speak was
that oratory was not necessarily associated with personal
attractiveness.  Mr. McGee, I observed, was not a handsome man.  His
face was flat and heavy--a face which no one would turn around to
look at a second time.  My second reflection was that physical action
in oratory was not essential for effect.  During the whole course of
his two hours' address he stood fixed to one spot on the platform,
with his hands clasped behind his back.  Only once did he unlock
them, and that was when carried away by the enthusiasm of a quotation
from Tennyson's 'Brook', he repeated in thrilling tones the words,
'Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever'.  This he applied
to the British Empire.  It was a glorious climax to his argument,
felt and remembered to this day.  The mellow richness of Mr. McGee's
voice, and the rhythm and cadence of the Queen's English as it flowed
from his lips, greatly impressed me.  I noted also the finish of his
sentences, coupled with a poetical glow which awakened emotions and
feelings never before touched by the human voice.  Of course argument
and fact and history were there, all beautifully blended.  But it was
not by these I was affected so much as by the white heat of the
mental crucible from which they issued, and the cadence--never
monotonous--of the lofty rhetoric with which they were adorned.  It
was a noble speech, I thought--the product of an exalted being--a
revelation of the power of articulate language and passion and poetry
all combined .... I never heard McGee again, but in reading his
speeches even now I see him as in a mirage, standing before me,
rolling out his beautiful sentences with the same grace and affluence
of language and voice as he did in 'the leafy month of June,' A.D.
1865."

While McGee was thus assisting in the creation of the Canadian
Dominion, the politics of Ireland once more began to intrude on his
attention.  Like many Irishmen it was his lot to be dogged in the
land of his adoption by the gloomy history of his native country.  In
the sixties Fenianism emerged as a political force in Ireland and
particularly in America, and from the outset McGee looked upon it
with fear.  Its fatal significance in his life makes it necessary to
treat briefly the rise and progress of the movement.

Following the famine of 1845, thousands of indigent Irishmen yearly
emigrated to the United States, burdened with bitter memories of the
starvation and the miseries that followed it.  Between 1846 and 1851,
more than one million persons died of hunger or its effects and more
than one million quitted the country.  In the succeeding years many
thousands more were yearly evicted from their slender holdings by
bankrupt landlords, anxious to sell their estates to rich graziers.
These evicted also sought a subsistence on the other side of the
Atlantic.  Deep in the heart of each was a love of Ireland, and a
hatred no less deep of England, whom the emigrant held responsible
for the miseries of his country.  In the fifties and sixties this
hatred proved the nursing mother of Fenianism.  The organizers of the
movement were James Stephens, John O'Mahony, John O'Leary, and T. C.
Luby.  All of these men had been in one way or another implicated in
the movement of 1848, although none so prominently as McGee.  The two
most dynamic characters were Stephens and O'Mahony.  None can doubt
their genuine love for Ireland.  Their ideal of gaining its
independence accompanied them when they fled as fugitive rebels to
Paris.  In 1850, they separated, O'Mahony going to New York and
Stephens eventually returning to Ireland, but neither lost his
youthful dream of Irish freedom.  In the following years it led them
into the shadowy paths of conspiracy.  In America O'Mahony
established the Fenian Brotherhood, named after the Fianna or Fenians
who in early centuries were soldiers devoted to the cause of Ireland.
He adopted the name as suitable for the men whom he was organizing
for the championship of the national cause by secret enterprise and
warfare.  In Ireland Stephens developed a society on similar lines,
but his secret army from the outset was handicapped by lack of funds.
The movement on both sides of the Atlantic made little headway until
the closing period of the American Civil War.  It then loomed into
supreme significance.  In the southern and northern armies were
thousands of Irish.  An Irish brigade, fighting for the north, had
won the highest laurels on many a contested field.  On the conclusion
of the war these hardened veterans were eager to turn their bayonets
to the cause of freeing Ireland, and they swelled the Fenian ranks.
At Boston, in 1865, O'Mahony boldly proclaimed their aim.  "Ours is
the only policy that can right the wrongs of Ireland.  The days of
peaceful agitation, of petitioning and parliamentary humbug is past
forever in Ireland.  The sword alone can win the liberty of that
green isle.  Away then with all associations that do not propose to
win Irish liberty by the stalwart arms of Irishmen."

The Fenian brotherhood had an intricate organization, with local
bodies called circles, all under the control of a head centre.
During 1865 it spread rapidly through the United States, and
penetrated into Canada, having many adherents in Montreal and
Toronto, with a zealous leader in Michael Murphy.  O'Mahony believed
in concentrating on Ireland, but two American leaders, Sweeny and
Roberts, preached the need of injuring British power by invading
Canada.  Their views prevailed among a body of their adherents, and
preparations were made to carry their threat into effect.  In view of
the many thousands of veterans disbanded by the northern government,
the situation was grave for Canada, and was rendered doubly so by the
strained relations existing between Britain and the United States.

McGee grasped the seriousness of the situation.  From the outset he
viewed the Fenian movement with hostility.  He had not lost his lyric
love for Ireland nor had he resigned his hope that Ireland's
aspirations for self-government might be satisfied.  But he had long
turned his back upon the methods of revolution.  He was convinced
that a revolution in Ireland was impracticable, and that an
unsuccessful rising would bring injury rather than benefit,
notwithstanding all the argument and passion of Stephens and
O'Mahony.  Moreover, from the time that he took up residence in
Canada, he condemned the introduction of Irish questions into
Canadian politics.  He believed that one of the weaknesses of his
countrymen was their long memory, and their tendency to feed on past
misfortunes.  In his famous Ottawa address of October, 1857, he
declared that, in the new country of his adoption he would not be
guided by the hostility towards Britain, which he had inherited from
his native country.  Irish politics and Canadian interests could not
be wholesomely mixed, and it was by the interests of the country in
which he lived that he would shape his career.  The new nationality
of which he made himself the apostle could not be advanced by the
importation of prickly disputes from another country.  In March,
1861, he gave frank advice to his Irish countrymen in Montreal,--"I
hold we have no right to intrude our Irish patriotism on this soil;
for our first duty is to the land where we live and have fixed our
homes, and where, while we live, we must find the true sphere of our
duties.  While always ready therefore to say the right word, and to
do the right act for the land of my forefathers, I am bound above all
to the land where I reside; and especially am I bound to put down, so
far as one humble layman can, the insensate spread of a strife which
can only tend to prolong our period of provincialism and make the
country an undesirable home for those who would otherwise willingly
cast in their lot among us.  We have acres enough; powers mechanical
and powers natural; and sources of credit enough to make out of this
province a great nation, and though I wish to commit no one to my
opinion, I trust that it will not only be so in itself, but will one
day form part of a greater British North American state, existing
under the sanction, and in perpetual alliance with the empire, under
which it had its rise and growth."

When Fenianism began to spread, he was trenchant in his attack.  To
him it was a disruptive conspiracy which could bring only disaster in
its wake.  In January, 1865, he was invited to deliver an address
before the St. Patrick's society of Montreal, and with bitterness,
bold but not discreet, he described the Fenian brotherhood as "a
seditious Irish society, originating at New York, whose founders have
chosen to go behind the long Christian record of their ancestors, to
find in days of Pagan darkness and blindness an appropriate name for
themselves".  In reply to the journalistic reports that Fenianism was
spreading in Upper Canada, he declared emphatically: "I would say to
the Catholics of Upper Canada, in each locality, if there is any, the
least proof that this foreign disease has seized on any, the least
among you, establish at once for your own sakes--for the country's
sake--a _cordon sanitaire_ around your people; establish a committee
which will purge your ranks of this political leprosy; weed out and
cast off these rotten members who, without a single governmental
grievance to complain of in Canada, would yet weaken and divide us in
these days of danger and anxiety."

With these audacious words he flung down the gage of battle to
Fenianism, and the contest continued unabated to his death.  From the
outset his attitude placed him in peril.  In the eyes of the more
relentless Fenians, he was an apostate whose death would remove an
obstacle to the triumph of their cause among the Canadian Irish.  His
visit to Ireland in the spring of 1865 added fuel to the hatred in
which he was held.  He had been sent over as Canadian representative
to the international exhibition at Dublin, an honour he deeply
appreciated.  While visiting his father in Wexford, he delivered an
address, far-reaching in its effects.  Reviewing his past career in
Ireland, he stated that the political aims of Young Ireland had been
foolish--a sufficient evidence of apostacy which his warmest Irish
friends did not welcome.  But his remarks concerning the Irish
Americans caused more resentment.  He warned his audience that there
was no national sympathy in the United States with Ireland and its
struggle for autonomy, notwithstanding the rhetoric of Irish American
orators.  "In the United States there is no more sympathy for Ireland
than for Japan, and far less than for Russia.  In New England the
people, tinctured with puritanism, proud of their property and of
their education, hate the Irish emigrant for his creed, despise him
for his poverty, and under-rate him for his want of book learning."
These were unsavoury statements to those who lauded the institutions
and people of republican America in contrast to those of the British
colonies, and accompanied as they were with caustic remarks
concerning the Irish leaders in the United States, they increased the
odium in which McGee was held by his Fenian countrymen.

The telegraph wires hurried his speech abroad, and in every quarter
it created a sensation.  The complimentary remarks of _The Times_--a
very conservative organ in its attitude towards Ireland--were
sufficient to condemn his address in the estimation of nationalist
Irishmen.  "We commend the speech of D'Arcy McGee at Wexford to the
attention of all intending emigrants to America--to the attention of
all the discontented classes in Ireland--to the attention of all who
believe that there is anything to be gained by plots and conspiracies
against the British government."  The Dublin _Nation_, in whose
columns McGee as a Young Irelander had written regularly, admitted
regretfully a marked falling away from his attitude in 1848.  "Irish
nationalists of the generation which has entered public life since
1848 will surely be startled by the boldness and severity of Mr.
McGee's judgments on men and movements amongst which he himself
figured so prominently seventeen years ago....  They reveal a fact
long known--and which indeed Mr. McGee has never affected to
conceal--that of all the Young Ireland leaders, he has receded
farthest in the rebound or reaction which followed upon the collapse
of that unhappy year of revolutions."

Amongst many Irish in Montreal McGee's Wexford speech aroused anger
and resentment.  Six hundred of his constituents issued an emphatic
disclaimer.  At some public meetings his name was hissed as a Judas.
During the Hibernian society picnic at Niagara Falls, three groans
were given for the traitor McGee.  But he had put his hand to the
plough, and he was determined not to turn back on the furrow.  During
a speech in November he attacked with increased severity the folly of
those who supported Fenianism.  He sneered upon the mock republic
which the Fenians had established in New York, with O'Mahony, an
escaped lunatic, as president.  With withering scorn he declared:
"Many of my friends complain that in my Wexford speech I ought to
have diluted my address with some strictures on the Irish grievances,
which badly call for redress.  I recognize these grievances as well
as they do.  I will go as far as any man in a constitutional effort
to obtain redress.  I will resign, if necessary, my place in the
ministry, so as to move a resolution in parliament along this line.
God knows the Ireland I loved in my youth is near and dear to my
heart.  She was a fair and radiant vision, full of the holy
self-sacrifice of the older time, but this Billingsgate beldame,
reeling and dishevelled from the purlieus of New York, with blasphemy
on her lips, and all uncleanliness in her breast, this shameless
impostor I resist with scorn and detestation."  Such provocative
words merely widened the breach between McGee and his Fenian
countrymen.  They may have restrained many Canadian Irish from
joining the Fenian conspiracy, but they infuriated the extremists,
who did not bury their hate.

In June, 1866, the crisis in the history of Fenianism occurred.  The
long projected invasion of Canada took place.  One thousand American
Irish under the command of Col. O'Neill, a man who had fought with
distinction under Sherman, crossed the Niagara river.  They won a
slight skirmish at Ridgeway, but the threatened interference of the
American government combined with the difficulty of bringing up
reinforcements forced them back across the river.  The gathering
storm had passed, but it left bitter memories behind.  The trials of
arrested Fenians kept feeling high, and in this state of ferment the
last year of the old régime in Canada passed.  The failure of the
invasion left Canadians free to complete the work of Confederation.




CHAPTER VI

CLOSING YEARS

In November, 1866, the delegation of ministers appointed to represent
Canada at the final drafting of the federal constitution sailed for
England.  McGee was not a member of the party, but some months later,
in February, 1867, he also left on what was destined to be his last
visit to Europe.  He went primarily to represent Canada at the
international exposition which Louis Napoleon in a burst of goodwill
held in Paris.  At this time his mind continued to be distressed by
the Fenian movement in Ireland and in America, and his imagination
grappled with plans whereby Irish discontent might be allayed.  It
was characteristic that one of his first acts on reaching England was
to address letters on the question to the two leaders of the
government, Lord Derby and his brilliant lieutenant, Benjamin
Disraeli.  He emphasized that the first task of Britain was to
re-establish confidence among the Irish people in the good intentions
of imperial statesmen.  The blundering policy of the past had blasted
such confidence.  The surest means to its repair was to refer the
whole state of Ireland to a royal commission of leading Irishmen in
whom the people might have faith.  Thus the local confidence felt in
the individuals might by a natural effect be transferred to the
government which appointed them, and the first step in the
reconciliation of the two islands be attained.  Future advances might
then be made upon the lines laid down by the commission.  McGee's
suggestion was at the time apparently too bold for imperial
statesmen, yet it was substantially carried into effect fifty years
later when the famous convention under the chairmanship of Sir Horace
Plunkett met in the Dublin rotunda.

Hurrying on from London, McGee reached Rome in March.  Professional
business called him there.  A dispute had arisen in Montreal between
St. Patrick's parish church and the Roman Catholic bishop in
ordinary, who sought to divide the parish.  An appeal was made to the
Pope.  McGee, with Thomas Ryan, represented the case of St.
Patrick's, and obtained a favourable answer to their suit.  It is to
be expected that with his deep Catholic sympathies and sensitive
imagination, McGee would be much impressed by the ancient capital of
the Catholic world.  "I shall never," he wrote, "be able to get this
city out of my memory and imagination."  But he was soon in an
atmosphere very different from the haunting impressiveness of Rome.

In April he was back in Paris for the opening of the exposition on
May 1.  The French capital seldom seemed so gay as in the spring of
1867.  Although the Second Empire was undermined and was soon to
tumble like a house of cards, it had all the glitter of tinsel
splendour.  Louis Napoleon, in the heyday of his career, presided
royally over the exhibition which his government had assembled, and
he honoured Canada, the youngest nation, by the appointment of McGee
as an examiner for prizes.  But amid Parisian magnificence, McGee was
not forgetful of those affairs which surrounded the birth of the
Canadian Dominion.  One political event filled him with uneasiness.
The Reformers who followed George Brown began to kick against the
traces of the coalition.  They had agreed to support the government
upon all questions directly affecting confederation, but they
announced that just as soon as the constitution became law they would
withdraw their support.  Brown with his pronounced puritan
earnestness and sledge-hammer methods preached that all coalitions
were evil, and none more evil than that formed by John A. Macdonald.
In the estimation of McGee, there were grave dangers involved in the
renewal of party warfare.  Federation was by no means out of the
woods.  The hostile attitude of large numbers in Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick combined with the recommencement of party strife in the
Canadas might well imperil the structure so painfully erected.  On
April 9, 1867, he penned his fears to Macdonald who was then in
London.  "There seem some rather embarrassing symptoms of old party
warfare getting up again, before confederation has even had a trial.
Theoretically, it is true, the work is done, but practically it is
only beginning.  At such a real crisis personal and party politics
might afford to listen awhile."

Of more significance was his political circular dispatched from Paris
in May.  In the main it was an attack on the revival of the old
parties, besmeared as they were with the mud of former conflicts.  It
contained the plea that "parties may, or rather must, arise under the
operations of the new constitution itself; but let them arise out of
conflicts of interpretation; out of the sequence of events; out of
the merits or demerits of the policy or want of policy of the first
federal administration.  Do not let us, for our common country's
sake--for the dear sake of our existence, not to say establishment,
as a distinct free people, in North America--usher in our new
condition of things, by raking up old sores and pelting each other
with old nicknames".  There was danger not merely of party conflict
hampering the new institutions, but of Canadian statesmen meeting the
venture of the young Dominion with minds insufficiently occupied with
constructive plans.  McGee briefly outlined his own views on such
pressing questions as colonization, railway building, protective
legislation, and educational institutions.  On all these matters
action had soon to be taken, and it was the path of wisdom to think
about them early.

On May 25, he was back in Montreal.  The civic reception was warm and
sincere, but it was not without its shadows.  It was clear that McGee
no longer had the unanimous homage of his constituents.  His
truceless war upon Fenianism had left him many enemies amongst the
Irish population, and mingled with the voices of welcome were those
of criticism.  Yet the message with which he greeted his constituents
was the same plea of good will, reinforced with his artistry of
words, which he had so long generously advanced.  "Many of the young
men here to-day will live to see the proof of what I am about to
state, that all other politics that have been preached in British
America will grow old and lose their lustre, but the conciliation of
class and class, the policy of linking together all our people in one
solid chain, and making up for the comparative paucity of our
members, being as we are a small people in this respect, by the moral
influence of our unity; the policy of smoothing down the sharp and
wounding edges of hostile prejudices; the policy of making all feel
an interest in the country, and each man in the character of each
section of the community, and of each other--each for all, and all
for each--this policy will never grow old, never will lose its
lustre.  The day never will come when the excellency of its beauty
will depart, so long as there is such a geographic denomination as
Canada."

An incident soon occurred which showed how ready was McGee to
sacrifice his own ambitions for the cause he eloquently pleaded.  In
June, John A. Macdonald grappled with the task of forming the first
ministry of the Dominion which was to be proclaimed on July 1.  His
difficulties were acute.  Cartier, with Gallic petulance, insisted
upon having in the cabinet three French-Canadian representatives.
The Protestant minority of Lower Canada, with Galt as leader, also
demanded representation.  McGee, as the most distinguished of the
Irish Roman Catholics, and as one of the most influential champions
of federation, was unquestionably entitled to office.  Thus there
would have been five ministers from the province of Quebec.  But
Howland and McDougall, reformers from the upper province who
supported Macdonald, demanded that Ontario, in virtue of its larger
population, should have one more member than Quebec.  To satisfy all
parties would mean that Ontario and Quebec should have between them
eleven cabinet seats.  With two representatives from each of the
maritime provinces the cabinet would in the estimation of Macdonald
be unworkably large.  So much was he repelled by the prospect that he
was on the point of advising the governor-general to send for Brown
when Tupper and McGee volunteered to facilitate matters by declining
office.  One of the two Nova Scotian members might then be a
representative of the Roman Catholics, and Tupper proposed Edward
Kenny of Halifax as a suitable man.  Macdonald accepted this generous
offer, which on his own confession enabled him to patch together the
first cabinet of the Dominion.

The sacrifice on the part of McGee and Tupper was considerable.  They
were men in that lusty prime of life when the passion for building a
career is strong.  Both had worked for confederation with a zeal
exceeded by none.  For McGee an office in the first cabinet of the
Dominion, whose emergence he had long heralded, would have been a
deep satisfaction.  His mind was charged with plans for the
strengthening of the young nation.  All the imaginative schemes which
the "Canada First" party later championed were in his thoughts, and
would have found in him an eloquent exponent.  Yet he stepped aside
from such prospects of attaining a certain distinction, without the
slightest attempt to bargain for place or office, and the self-denial
was the keener in that his pecuniary means were slender.

Following soon upon the announcement of the new government on July 1,
the election campaign for the first Canadian parliament began.  It
was McGee's last and most strenuous contest.  The issue in his
constituency was Fenianism.  For the first time, a large body of his
constituents chose as an opponent an Irish Roman Catholic, a Mr.
Devlin, who canvassed for the radical vote.  From the outset the
campaign was tumultuous.  McGee's first meeting was broken up by the
violence of a mob and he himself narrowly escaped injury.  But he was
not cowed.  He had learned that in public life one must be prepared
to pass the fierce test of election trials.  He was determined to
fight the opposition without gloves.  In August he published a series
of letters reviewing the growth of the Fenian brotherhood in
Montreal.  With an indiscreet boldness, he named the men who had been
leaders in conspiracy and made public their communications with the
headquarters in New York.  Such an exposure, incriminating many
leading Montreal Irishmen, intensified the bitterness of the contest.
Among his opponents were relentless men who were determined to make
it now a fight to the death.  His life came to be in danger, and
during the remainder of the campaign he was under police protection.
On nomination day, August 20, a mob jostled him from the hustings,
and the lives of his friends were threatened.  In spite of this he
carried the election, although with a much depleted majority.  One
ominous fact stood out amid the tumults of these weeks.  He had lost
the unanimous homage of his Catholic countrymen.  Formal evidence of
this was exhibited some months later when his name was struck from
the lists of the St. Patrick's society, of which he had formerly been
the president.

In November the parliament of the Dominion assembled.  It might seem
that Confederation, being carried, was no longer an issue.  Such was
by no means the case.  Nova Scotia had repented her action in joining
with the other colonies, and in a mood of sulkiness sent to
parliament a solid phalanx of anti-unionists directed by a veteran
political strategist, Joseph Howe.  It was a singular twist of
circumstances and personal motives which pushed Howe to the front as
an opponent of federation.  Little more than four years before, when
on the mention of colonial union the heart of the average politician
failed him with fear, Joseph Howe had stood at Halifax on the same
platform with McGee and used his eloquent tongue for the advancement
of colonial co-operation.  As a popularizer of the idea of union, he
ranked close to McGee, as in native eloquence he was scarcely
inferior.  But while the member for Montreal without deviation
pleaded in season and out of season the great cause which had
captivated his imagination, Howe at the critical time drew back, and
blemished a great career by endeavouring to block what he had
formerly advocated.  Whatever were the reasons influencing him--and
they were not all selfish--he was not found reaping in the field
where he, McGee, and others had sown.  In November he was attacking
Confederation in the House, and McGee with stern admonishing
eloquence was defending it against his assault.

In the succeeding months McGee's activity was as varied and ceaseless
as ever.  He was still in very large demand as a lecturer, and with
personal trouble and expense he went long distances to deliver
lectures for the benefit of charities.  One of his most famous
addresses was on _The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion_, delivered
in Montreal on November 4, 1867, in which he pleaded for the
development of mental self-reliance as an essential condition of
political independence.  A literature to shape and express the mind
of the new nation was as imperative as self-governing institutions.
At the time Canada had no literature.  Journalism, it is true,
flourished like a green bay tree.  In the four provinces there were
about one hundred and thirty journals, thirty of which were published
daily.  But this ephemeral literature was characterized by a
narrowness of view, a local egotism, and a lamentable absence of
anything approaching a catholic spirit.  In addition to elevating the
tone of journalism, McGee believed that Canadians with national
development at heart must encourage a literature "calculated to our
own meridian, and hitting home our own society, either where it is
sluggish or priggish, or wholly defective in its present style of
culture".  Literary talent should be cherished as precious.  He hoped
that "if a native book should lack the finish of a foreign one, as a
novice may well be less expert than an old hand, yet if the book be
honestly designed, and conscientiously worked up, the author shall be
encouraged, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of the better
things which we look forward to with hopefulness.  I make this plea
on behalf of those who venture upon authorship among us because I
believe the existence of a recognized literary class will by and by
be felt as a state and social necessity."  The new northern nation,
notwithstanding that it possessed all the benefits which Nature could
possibly bestow, would still in his estimation be impoverished if it
failed to develop a cultural life.  He endeavoured to direct the
attention of Canadians to the fact that there should be built upon
the political unity already attained a life of the mind on which the
vitality of a nation finally depended.

The cause of union which had fired McGee's mind since his immigration
to Canada was now attained.  What was to be his future?  Political
life had never failed to attract him, for he liked its intensities of
struggle.  His future in Canadian politics was secure.  Few public
men of the time were held in such esteem throughout the British
provinces, and none had so quickly jumped into prominence.  His
career was not closed by his absence from the first cabinet of the
Dominion.  Macdonald had confessed that his admission to a cabinet
office could only be a matter of short delay.  Yet work other than
that of public life attracted him.  He had never lost the ideal, born
in his youth, of devoting himself to literature.  By temperament he
was a man of letters.  His vivid imagination sought expression in the
creation of what might be a permanent addition to literature:

  I dreamed a dream when the woods were green,
  And my April heart made an April scene,
    In the far, far distant land,
  That even I might something do
  That would keep my memory for the true,
    And my name from the spoiler's hand!

From the summer of 1867, he looked forward to obtaining a
commissionership under the government, which would maintain him and
his family, while providing leisure for literary work.  These were
the hopes shattered suddenly by his murder.

During January and February, 1868, McGee was seriously ill in
Montreal, but in March he was back in Ottawa for the opening of
parliament.  The crucial issue of the period was the inclusion of
Nova Scotia in the federation.  A delegation of Nova Scotians headed
by the redoubtable Howe had gone to Britain to obtain the support of
British statesmen in the endeavour to release their province from the
federation.  To neutralize their influence by stating the counter
case, the Canadian government in March sent over Tupper.  To the Nova
Scotian anti-unionists--and they constituted a majority of the
representatives of the province--the little energetic doctor was
anathema.  With painstaking bitterness, they assailed his
appointment.  On the evening of April 6, Dr. Parker, a Nova Scotian
representative, made a personal attack on Tupper, demanding his
recall.  He declared that he was "utterly disqualified for being a
representative of the Dominion, and sending him only deepened the
disaffection of the sister province of Nova Scotia".

In reply to Parker, McGee declared that the motion to recall Tupper
was delivering Confederation a stab in the dark.  "If he had been in
earnest in wishing to give the new system a fair trial, he would have
said: I do not think Mr. Tupper was the best choice, but since he has
gone I wish him all success for the sake of the union."  In
impassioned words which show how poignantly his own bitter struggle
with Fenianism was on his mind, he argued that Tupper should not be
judged by the transitory ill-esteem in which he was held by his
countrymen.  "We should not make a mere local or temporary popularity
the test of the qualification of a public servant.  He who built on
popularity built on a shifting sand.  The man who showed he was ready
to suffer for his principles as well as triumph with his principles
was far beyond comparison with the mere popularity hunter.  It would
be a base spirit to sacrifice the man who had sacrificed himself for
the sake of the union."  No attentive parliamentarian who heard these
words could have foreseen that in little more than an hour McGee
himself was to be sacrificed for his opinions.

No less significant than his defence of Tupper was his plea that Nova
Scotia should await the action of time for the consolidation of the
provinces into a great nation, all parts of which would find justice.
"I have great reliance on the mellowing effects of time.  It is not
the lime, and the sand, and the hair of the mortar, but the time
which has taken to temper it.  And if time be so necessary an element
in so rudimentary a process as the mixing of mortar, of how much
greater importance must it be in the work of consolidating the
confederation of these provinces.  Time, sir, will heal all existing
irritations; time will mellow and refine all points of contrast that
seem so harsh to-day; time will come to the aid of the pervading
principles of impartial justice, which happily permeate the whole
land.  By and by time will show the constitution of this Dominion as
much cherished in the hearts of the people of all its provinces, not
excepting Nova Scotia, as is the British constitution itself."  Such
was McGee's last confession of faith.  It lost none of its force in
the grace and beauty of its language.

He spoke at midnight.  Shortly after one o'clock on the morning of
the 7th, the debate closed.  The members, while putting on their
coats, commented generally on McGee's speech; some thought that it
was the most effective they had ever heard him deliver.  He lit his
cigar, and in company with Macfarlane, a very intimate friend, went
down the board walk towards his lodging.  It was an exhilarating
night, with a bright full moon and the tonic air of early spring.
McGee was in elated spirits.  Perhaps part of his light-heartedness
was caused by the reflection that on the morrow he would return to
Montreal, where his wife and daughters were, within a few days to
celebrate his forty-third birthday.  Letters from home had informed
him of the preparations.  At what is now one of Ottawa's busy
corners, that of Sparks and Metcalfe Streets, he left his friend, and
alone walked to his lodging on Sparks Street.  As he endeavoured to
open his door with a latch key, a slight figure glided up and at
close range fired a bullet into his head.  There was no cry, only the
deadly crack of the pistol, and McGee pitched forward on his
doorstep.  His work done, the assassin dashed away in the night, but
left tell-tale steps in the snow, later to assist in his conviction.
Some inmates of the house, who had not retired, immediately
discovered the body, and soon the dreary news was circulating through
Ottawa and across the telegraph wires to all parts of the Dominion.

The following afternoon, Sir John Macdonald before a gloomy chamber
gave expression to the public sorrow, and in token of it adjourned
the House.  Meanwhile Ottawa was feverishly searched for the
assassin.  The prison was soon filled with suspects.  The Dominion
government offered $5,000 reward for information concerning the
culprit or culprits, and the two provinces, Quebec and Ontario, each
offered $2,500.  Incriminating evidence quickly accumulated against
Patrick James Whelan, a comparatively young man, whose trial began on
the 17th of the month.  From the outset the chain of circumstantial
evidence against him was strong.  He had long been implicated in the
Fenian movement, having been discharged from the army in Quebec for
Fenian sentiments.  He had but recently come to Ottawa, and on the
night of the murder had been seen in the gallery of the house.  After
his arrest there was found in his possession a revolver, one chamber
of which had been recently discharged.  But the most conclusive of
the many facts of evidence was submitted by a French Canadian,
Lacroix, who declared that he saw Whelan commit the deed.
Notwithstanding the weighty case relentlessly built up by the
prosecuting attorney the trial dragged wearily into the following
year.  Finally, on February 11, 1869, Whelan, pleading innocence to
the end, met his death on the scaffold.  It has remained
problematical how far he was the fatal instrument of the Fenian
brotherhood or how far his action, like that of the man who shot
Lincoln, was due merely to personal hate.  The evidence would seem to
make it clear that Whelan did not receive instructions from a head
centre outside the country, but that he performed the deed to satisfy
the hatred of himself and a few Canadian Fenians whose identity is
uncertain.

McGee died a martyr for the young Dominion.  Such was the judgment of
contemporaries, and history need not reject it.  On the day following
the murder, Sir John Macdonald described "how easy it would have been
for him, had he chosen, to have sailed along the full tide of
popularity with thousands and hundreds of thousands, without the loss
of a single plaudit, but he has been slain, and I fear slain because
he preferred the path of duty".  From the time that he resolved to
fight Fenianism, his life was in danger.  Had he been more passive,
and allowed the movement to wreck itself, he would not have incurred
the enmity of Whelan and his associates.  But McGee never entered a
cause half-heartedly.  He had the firm conviction that Fenianism was
a menace, not merely to Canada, but to Ireland.  It represented an
anarchical and revolutionary spirit which long ago he had come to
dread.  It endeavoured to overthrow the British Empire, which he
considered a magnificent instrument in spreading civilization.  Hence
he fought it with as much intensity as he had formerly struggled for
Irish independence, and his guilt, to the minds of his opponents, was
that of an apostate as well as of an enemy.

As McGee's last speech was a plea for the conciliation of all members
of the new Dominion, so his last letter of public significance was a
passionate plea for reform in Ireland.  Just two days before his
death he had dined with an old Ottawa friend, Alderman Goodwin, and
after dinner had excused himself to pen a letter to Lord Mayo, then
chief secretary for Ireland, which was described aptly by a
contemporary as having "struck the heart of the British nation like a
cry for justice from the grave".  In a parliamentary speech, Lord
Mayo had referred to McGee's loyalty as that of a Canadian Irishman.
McGee in his letter endeavoured to make clear why Irishmen like
himself were loyal in Canada, and how the loyalty of those in Ireland
might be won.  Canada did not have the abuses which in Ireland was
the prime source of discontent.  There was no established church, no
system of tenancy at will, no poor laws, nor any need of them.
Instead there was the recognition of complete religious equality, a
general acquisition of property as the reward of well-directed
industry, and the fullest local control of revenues and resources.
Such was the head-spring of Irish loyalty in Canada, and "were it
otherwise, we would be otherwise".  This letter is the best apology
for the chequered career of the young Irish rebel of 1848, who died
twenty years later the champion of a British American nationality,
linked by bonds of sentiment to the Britain across the seas.




CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

McGee's position among the few outstanding fathers of Confederation
is secure.  His work was not that of a constitutional architect
giving expression to political needs in the legal terms of a
constitution.  Nor was he a party leader, subtly pulling together the
strings guiding political groups, and through the resulting
combination carrying measures beneficial to the community.  In both
these fields Sir John Macdonald easily carries away most of the
honours.  McGee's task was that of inspiration.  His position was
that of a prophet and a guide.  Creative statesmen fall into two
categories--those who inspire a people to establish new structures,
and those who build in under their influence the bricks and mortar of
the new creation.  McGee, in the most plastic period of Canadian
history, belonged to the former class.  Throughout the brief span of
his life in Canada, he had been the untiring advocate of union
amongst the colonies.  He had championed it in the press and on
public platforms from Lake Huron to the Atlantic.  In the
legislature, he had pushed it forward through the weary bickerings
over much smaller issues.  He had made the colonists realize that to
them there was no subject of equal magnitude.  This was the prime
question of their destiny.

Coming to the Canadas as a stranger, his mind was not cramped by
local patriotism nor handicapped by the shortness of vision
characteristic of many colonial leaders.  He saw the common interests
of all the colonies to a degree that was difficult with men who had
matured within the confines of one, and who were content to worship
only at its shrine.

He had an additional advantage.  He had been reared in an old
community with long traditions and in possession of that virile
community-consciousness which we call nationality.  His mind had
developed in contact with a group of young brilliant men who sought
to revivify the life of their nation, and who went to its traditions
for inspiration.  McGee never lost the effect of such experiences and
aspirations.  The vision of giving new vitality to a nation and
setting it on the path of fresh development continued to stir his
imagination.  When he came to Canada, he did not find an old
community, as in Ireland, in need of inspiration for fresh
accomplishments; he found all the elements necessary for the building
of a new northern nation, and the prospect of assisting its creation
was the spur of his Canadian career.

Union of the colonies was the first and most important step towards
the attainment of a national existence.  It was the essential
foundation for everything else.  But McGee did not overlook other and
subsidiary policies necessary for the same end.  That on which he had
laid most emphasis was the development of a broad-minded national
spirit which would sponge out from politics the influence of
sectarian and sectional interests.  Tolerance of the differences of
race and creed must, he argued, be the corner stone of the Dominion.
There was need of emphasizing this doctrine, for the parochialism of
colonial government and the seclusion of colonial society tended to
shut out the healthy air of large affairs, and develop a pettiness of
mind and an intolerance of spirit.  The differences between the
French and the English--differences of race and creed--seemed to be
an insurmountable obstacle to the emergence of a national community
embracing them all.  But McGee was not despondent over such
differences.  He believed that the task of the new nationality was to
reconcile them through toleration.  In 1865, in St. John, he declared
that "the bilingual line which divides us socially is one of the
difficulties of the government of the country.  But though a
difficulty it is by no means a serious danger, unless it were to be
aggravated by a sense of injustice, inflicted either by the local
French majority on the English minority, or by the English majority
on the French minority.  So long as we respect in Canada the rights
of minorities, told either by tongue or creed, we are safe, for so
long it will be possible for us to be united; but when we cease to
respect those rights, we will be in the full tide towards that
madness which the ancients considered the gods sent to those whom
they wished to destroy."

It is always difficult to determine accurately the influence of a
political educator.  There is no exception in the case of McGee.  But
there is not the slightest doubt that his effect on the colonial mind
was very considerable.  While he was expounding throughout the
country his great cause, a number of young and able men were growing
to maturity who later bore eloquent testimony to the penetrating
influence of his teaching.  The prominent members of this group--H.
J. Morgan, Charles Mair, R. J. Haliburton, G. T. Denison, and W. A.
Foster--formed a few years after McGee's death the "Canada First"
party, dedicated to the task of advancing the cause of Canadian
nationality.  In this brilliant party, McGee left disciples to
champion all that he had projected.  In 1871, their ideas and visions
found expression in a lecture of W. A. Foster, entitled _Canada
First, or Our New Nationality_.  Foster gave to McGee the premier
position among those instrumental in arousing a Canadian national
idealism.  He paid the warm homage of himself and his associates in a
passage remarkable alike for its passionate eloquence and for its
unstinted admiration of the man who inspired it:


    There is a name I would fain approach with befitting reverence,
    for it casts athwart memory the shadow of all those qualities
    that man admires in man.  It tells of one in whom the generous
    enthusiasm of youth was but hallowed by the experiences of
    cultured manhood; of one who lavished the warm love of an Irish
    heart on the land of his birth, yet gave a loyal and true
    affection to the land of his adoption; who strove with all the
    power of genius to convert the stagnant pool of politics into a
    stream of living water; who dared to be national in the face of
    provincial selfishness, and impartially liberal in the teeth of
    sectarian strife; who from Halifax to Sandwich sowed broadcast
    the seeds of a higher national life, and with persuasive
    eloquence drew us closer together as a people, pointing out to
    each what was good in the other, wreathing our sympathies and
    blending our hopes; yes! one who breathed into our new Dominion
    the spirit of a proud self-reliance, and first taught Canadians
    to respect themselves.  Was it a wonder that a cry of agony rang
    throughout the land when murder, foul and most unnatural, drank
    the life-blood of Thomas D'Arcy McGee?



The memory and influence of McGee lived not merely in the counsels of
the "Canada First" party, but in the efforts of Canadian statesmen in
succeeding years to make Canada strong within herself.  Even when
leaders appeared who may have forgotten his name and had not heard in
the legislature or on the public platform his silver speech, their
work for the completion of Canadian autonomy was but a fulfilment of
what he had advocated.  Canada as a self-governing nation, linked
fraternally to Britain and other parts of the Empire, was McGee's
goal for the Canadian people.  Since Confederation they have been
steadily advancing towards it, and thus paying homage to the strength
and vision of McGee's ideals.

McGee has importance in Canadian history for other reasons than his
statesmanship.  He holds no mean place in Canadian literature.
Historical myth puts into the mouth of Wolfe the remark that he would
sooner have written Gray's "Elegy" than take Quebec.  The poet may be
greater than the soldier, and similarly the literary artist may be
placed above the statesman; yet statecraft has drawn fervid minds
from poetry to political action.  It drew McGee.  While, in
temperament and aspiration, he was a man of letters, so resistless
was the attraction of politics that in it he expended most of his
energies.  But any account of his life which would leave out of
consideration McGee as a _littérateur_ would be incomplete.
Something has already been said about his oratory.  A native oratory
was one of the most distinctive elements in his equipment as he
started on the path to fame.  Yet from the outset he used his pen
more frequently than his tongue.  From his first arrival in America
to his death, he wrote continuously prose and poetry.

Most of this literary output found expression in the journals with
which he had been connected, but he left to his name a goodly number
of volumes dealing with historical and biographical subjects.  Of
these two have already been mentioned as contributing to the cause of
Canadian Confederation, _Notes on Federal Government Past and
Present_ and _Speeches on British American Union_.  All the others
deal with Irish history and biography, which next to living political
causes engaged McGee's imagination.  The most noted of these books
was his _Popular History of Ireland_, on which he had begun earnest
labour in 1858, but which exacting political activities had prevented
him from finishing till 1863.  On many an evening within these years,
he would retire to his room from the battles of parliamentary debate
and, forgetful for the time being of Canadian problems, would trace
out the struggle of the Vikings for Ireland or some other dramatic
phase of Irish history.

Within his life-time no complete collection of his poems was made.
They appeared chiefly in the various newspapers on both sides of the
Atlantic to which he had contributed.  The year after his death they
were collected and published by his friend Mrs. Sadlier.  One little
volume he himself published in 1858, _Canadian Ballads and Occasional
Verses_.  It was a worthy tribute to his interest in the history of
his newly adopted country, and was addressed to those who looked
forward to the development of the colonies into a great new northern
nation.  The subject matter of his verses is varied.  Many deal with
the affections; others are religious in sentiment; but the greater
number are patriotic and historical.  They are concerned with the
saints and heroes of Ireland's story, from St. Patrick to Smith
O'Brien.  They throb with the fervour of a patriot as they tell of
Innisfail, the Ireland of ancient times, and of how

  Long, long ago, beyond the misty space
    Of twice a thousand years,
  In Erin old there dwelt a mighty race,
    Taller than Roman spears;
  Like oaks and towers, they had a giant grace,
    Were fleet as deers,
  With winds and wave they made their 'biding place,
    These Western shepherd-seers.


McGee's imagination revelled in the traditions and myths of the
Celts.  He expressed that brooding melancholy over the past which has
ever been the pervading sentiment of Irish poetry.  He believed that
the Celtic race had a soul that was chastened by past misfortunes,
and yet was not without hope in the present.  He invoked it in the
lines:

  Soul of my race!  Soul eternal!
  That liveth through evil and time--
  That twineth still laurels all vernal,
  As if laurels could once more be thine!
  Oh hear me, oh cheer me, be near me,
  Oh guide me or chide me alway,
  But do not fly from me or fear me--
  I'm all clay when thou, Soul, art away.


McGee's poetry was shaped largely by the group of Young Ireland who
taught that verse might be used as a convenient means of drawing upon
Irish traditions for the purpose of arousing a national
consciousness.  From its nature such poetry has limitations.  It must
fail to win the universal appeal of verse with no national end to
serve.  McGee was not limited in his allegiance to Ireland.  His
_Canadian Ballads_ were inspired by incidents in Canadian history,
and were intended to show the fertility of Canadian annals in
subjects adaptable to verse.  It was his belief that "of all the
forms of patriotism, a wise, public-spirited patriotism in literature
is not the least admirable.  It is, indeed, glorious to die in battle
in defence of our homes or altars; but not less glorious is it to
live to celebrate the virtues of our heroic countrymen, to adorn the
history, or to preserve the traditions of our country".

As might be expected in the work of a man enmeshed in the ceaseless
activities of public life, to whom poetry was of necessity an
embroidery to other activities, his compositions are uneven.  They
are always spontaneous, but frequently show a roughness that a
painstaking workmanship would have removed.  Yet there are bursts of
genuine lyric quality that will receive the commendation of even the
critical.  Of a simple beauty are the lines imitated from the Irish
and named _A Contrast_:


  I.

  Bebinn is straight as a poplar,
    Queenly and comely to see,
  But she seems so fit for a sceptre,
    She never could give it to me.
  Aine is lithe as a willow,
    And her eye, whether tearful or gay,
  So true to her thought, that in Aine
    I find a new charm every day.

  II.

  Bebinn calmly and silently sails
    Down life's stream like a snow-breasted swan;
  She's so lonesomely grand, that she seems
    To shrink from the presence of man.
  Aine basks in the glad summer sun,
    Like a young dove let loose in the air;
  Sings, dances, and laughs--but for me
    Her joy does not make her less fair.

  III.

  Oh! give me the nature that shows
    Its emotions of mirth or of pain,
  As the water that glides, and the corn that grows,
    Show shadow and sunlight again.
  Oh! give me the brow that can bend,
    Oh! give me the eyes that can weep,
  And give me a heart like Lough Neagh,
    As full of emotions and deep.


To Gavan Duffy, the warmest of his friends among the Young Ireland
group, he wrote lines that expressed a yearning for an old
companionship amid old scenes:

  Oh! for one week amid the emerald fields,
    Where the Avoca sings the song of Moore;
  Oh! for the odor the brown heather yields,
    To glad the pilgrim's heart on Glenmalur!

  Yet is there still what meeting could not give,
    A joy most suited of all joys to last;
  For, ever in fair memory there must live
    The bright, unclouded picture of the past.

  Old friend! the years wear on, and many cares
    And many sorrows both of us have known;
  Time for us both a quiet couch prepares--
    A couch like Jacob's, pillow'd with a stone.

  And oh! when thus we sleep may we behold
    The angelic ladder of the Patriarch's dream;
  And may my feet upon its rungs of gold
    Yours follow, as of old, by hill and stream!


Of his Canadian ballads one of the best known is _The Arctic Indian's
Faith_:


  I.

  We worship the spirit that walks unseen
  Through our land of ice and snow:
  We know not His face, we know not His place,
  But His presence and power we know.

  II.

  Does the Buffalo need the Pale-face word
  To find his pathway far?
  What guide has he to the hidden ford,
  Or where the green pastures are?
  Who teacheth the Moose that the hunter's gun
  Is peering out of the shade--
  Who teacheth the doe and the fawn to run
  In the track the Moose has made?

  III.

  Him do we follow, Him do we fear--
  The spirit of earth and sky;--
  Who hears with the Wapiti's eager ear
  His poor red children's cry.
  Whose whisper we note in every breeze
  That stirs the birch canoe--
  Who hangs the reindeer moss on the trees
  For the food of the Caribou.

  IV.

  That Spirit we worship who walks unseen
  Through our land of ice and snow:
  We know not His face, we know not His place,
  But His presence and power we know.


McGee's power as an orator deserves special mention in this
concluding chapter.  There are few orators whose speeches have
literary value.  Supreme eloquence is rare and generally transitory.
It is inspired by the gravity of great events or dramatic situations.
When the vivid circumstances have passed, the printed sentences
divorced from the inspiring presence of the orator lose their former
magic influence.  Thus, most great speeches come down in history as a
feeble echo of what they had been when delivered.  Those of Edmund
Burke are an exception that prove the rule.  McGee was an orator of
great power, and his orations, delivered without the use of notes,
live as literature.  Something of the beauty of his expressions may
be gathered from the few quotations on preceding pages.  But these
quotations do little to recall their thrilling effect when they were
delivered by McGee.  Leading contemporaries agreed in giving him the
first position amongst the orators of Confederation, and the verdict
of contemporaries on such a subject must be accepted.  Sir Charles
Tupper, on hearing the news of McGee's death, remarked that "the
grave has closed over the most eloquent man in Canada."  The _Globe_,
in an editorial the day after his assassination, stated that "whether
his hearers sympathized or not with what he said, it was impossible
for anyone not to acknowledge that he was marvellously eloquent; that
his words were fitly chosen, and gave every intimation of masterly
power....  His wit--his power of sarcasm---his readiness in
reply--his aptness in quotation--his pathos which melted to tears,
and his broad humour which convulsed with laughter--were all
undoubtedly of a very high order.  Among the orators of Canada,
either within or without the House, he has not, we believe, left his
equal, and even his opponents will miss the speeches in which he
developed his plans for promoting the greatness of Canada."  This
judgment is all the more convincing in that the _Globe_ had been for
some years previous hostile to McGee.

Joseph Howe had won many laurels as an orator, yet the brilliant
French-Canadian writer, Hector Fabre, considered him inferior to
McGee.  "Mr. Howe is well adapted to the tribune; he pleases, he
amuses, he charms; but a severer taste would say that his is far from
the brilliant eloquence, the irreproachable diction, the constantly
pure style, the breadth of views and the rectitude of ideas of Mr.
McGee.  To my mind Mr. McGee is a nearly perfect orator, and one who
in many senses has no superior."

Of McGee's domestic and private life, little need be said.  It was
happy in the highest degree.  He was married in the period of his
association with Young Ireland, and his wife shared the subsequent
adventures of his chequered career, and survived his tragic death.
His home presented to all who entered it a charming circle.  McGee,
with his family, was like a joyous boy.  He would often be found
romping on the floor with his baby daughter.  Of his children only
two daughters survived, one of whom took the veil.  A genial,
convivial nature and an ever sparkling humour won him friends in
every part of Canada.  One of the many tokens of esteem on the part
of his townsfolk in Montreal was the present of a handsome furnished
house in one of the best districts of the city.  Although an Irishman
and a very devout Catholic, he gained the warm homage of the Scotch
Presbyterian population in Lower Canada, a homage deeper than that
bestowed by the Scotch on any of their own countrymen.  At the old
Irish and Scottish festival of Hallowe'en he had been an ever welcome
speaker in the St. Andrew's Society.  It is interesting to note that
on the Hallowe'en after his death, thirty-seven of the forty-six
poems competing for prizes contained some allusion to him, and one
lamented his absence in Scotland's old dialect:

  Ah! wad that he were here the nicht,
    Whase tongue was like a faerie lute!
  But vain the wish: McGee! thy might
    Lies low in death--thy voice is mute.
  He's gane, the noblest o' us a'--
    Aboon a' care o' worldly fame;
  An' wha sae proud as he to ca'
    Our Canada his hame?

  The gentle maple weeps an' waves
    Aboon our patriot-statesman's heed;
  But if we prize the licht he gave,
    We'll bury feuds of race and creed.
  For this he wrocht, for this he died;
    An' for the luve we bear his name,
  Let's live as brithers, side by side,
    In Canada, our hame.


These simple Scotch verses strike the most memorable fact respecting
McGee.  His name should live in Canadian History as a statesman,
orator, and poet.  But he should be remembered for an additional
reason.  The Dominion, for which he laboured, grew, as he prophesied
that it would grow, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and its
scattered provinces, flattened out over a vast territory, are bound
together by the steel lines of trans-continental railways.  Yet such
material bases of union must fail to hold together the different
sects and races inhabiting the Dominion, unless Canadians cherish
what McGee passionately advanced, the spirit of toleration and
goodwill as the best expression of Canadian nationality.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

No adequate biography of Thomas D'Arcy McGee has hitherto been
written.  Consequently the student of his life must depend upon
sundry sources of information.  Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's books,
_Young Ireland _(New York, 1881), _Four Years of Irish History_
(London, 1883), and _My Life in Two Hemispheres_ (London, 1898)
contain material on McGee's adventures as a Young Irelander.

For the study of his Canadian career, his own _Speeches and
Addresses, chiefly on the Subject of British-American Union_ (London,
1865) is of prime interest.  This volume comprises his leading
speeches on the subject of Confederation, but many more of his
addresses must be sought for in the columns of Canadian newspapers,
particularly in the _Montreal Gazette_.  The _Canadian Freeman_,
published in Toronto from 1858 to 1869, was a Catholic paper which
gave special place to McGee's views.  Of course, the _New Era_ is
also of interest.  In the _British American Magazine_ for August and
October, 1863, McGee wrote articles on British American nationality.
A few of his remarks in parliament on the same subject may be found
in Thompson's _Mirror of Parliament_ for 1860.  Much interesting
material will be found in the _Memoirs of Ralph Vansittart_ (Toronto,
1924) by Edward Robert Cameron, a personal friend of McGee.  W. A.
Foster, _Canada First_ (Toronto, 1890; with intr. by Goldwin Smith)
is worth consulting for a contemporary opinion on McGee's influence
over the younger generation of Canadians.  George W. Ross, _Getting
into Parliament and After_ (Toronto, 1913) has a good, if brief,
description of McGee as an orator.  Joseph Pope, _The Memoirs of the
Right Hon. Sir John A. Macdonald_ (Ottawa, 1894) contains some
information of interest.  The _Macdonald Papers_ in the Dominion
Archives, have a fund of material on the movement of Confederation,
with which McGee was so intimately connected.  Sir Charles Tupper,
_Recollections of Sixty Years_ (London, 1914) has a few notes of
interest.

The following brief sketches and studies may be mentioned: Fennings
Taylor, _Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Sketch of His Life and Death_
(Montreal, 1868).  Henry J. O'C. Clarke, _A Short Sketch of the Life
of Thomas D'Arcy McGee_ (Montreal, 1868).  N. F. Davin, _The Irishman
in Canada_ (Toronto, 1877), devotes a few pages to McGee.  Charles
Dent, _Canadian Portrait Gallery_, (Toronto, 1881), volume III, has a
sketch of McGee's life.  Robert McGibbon, _Thomas D'Arcy McGee: An
Address Before the St. Patrick's Society of Sherbrooke_ (Montreal
1884).  J. K. Foran, _Thomas D'Arcy McGee as an Empire Builder_
(Ottawa, 1906), an address before the Empire Club of Toronto.  H. O.
Hammond, _Confederation and Its Leaders_ (Toronto, 1917), contains a
brief chapter on McGee.  W. S. Wallace, _Growth of Canadian National
Feeling_ (Canadian Historical Review, June, 1920), discusses McGee's
part in the creation of a Canadian national sentiment.  D. C. Harvey,
_Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the Prophet of Canadian Nationality_
(University of Manitoba, 1923) describes McGee as a Canadian
nationalist and quotes from his speeches.

McGee's collected poems were edited and published by Mrs. Sadlier
(New York, 1869).  Mrs. Sadlier's introduction contains some valuable
information concerning McGee's life.

The following is a list of the more important of McGee's other books:
_O'Connell and His Friends_ (Boston, 1845); _Historical Sketches of
Irish Settlers in America_ (Boston, 1855); _Catholic History of North
America_ (Boston, 1855); _Life of Bishop Maginn_ (New York, 1857);
_Canadian Ballads and Occasional Verses_ (Toronto, 1858); _The Irish
Writers of the 17th Century_ (Dublin, 1863); _Popular History of
Ireland_ (New York, 1863); and _Notes on Federal Governments Past and
Present_ (Montreal, 1865).



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