The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThomas D'Arcy McGeeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Thomas D'Arcy McGeeAuthor: Alexander BradyEditor: W. Stewart WallaceRelease date: November 27, 2022 [eBook #69431]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: Canada: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1925Credits: Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS D'ARCY MCGEE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Thomas D'Arcy McGeeAuthor: Alexander BradyEditor: W. Stewart WallaceRelease date: November 27, 2022 [eBook #69431]Most recently updated: October 19, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: Canada: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1925Credits: Al Haines
Title: Thomas D'Arcy McGee
Author: Alexander BradyEditor: W. Stewart Wallace
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, 1925
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THOMAS D'ARCY MCGEE ***
THOMAS D'ARCY McGEETHOMAS D'ARCY McGEE
BY
ALEXANDER BRADY
Lecturer in Political Science,University of Toronto
TORONTOTHE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED1925
Copyright, Canada, 1925BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITEDPrinted 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
IYOUTH
IITHE LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE
IIITHE PROPHET OF CANADIAN NATIONALITY
IVIN OFFICE AND OUT OF IT
VCONFEDERATION AND FENIANISM
VICLOSING YEARS
VIICONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THOMAS D'ARCY McGEE
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 theBoston Pilotwith 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 thePilot. 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 thePilot. 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 theFreeman'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 theFreemanbrought 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 theFreeman. 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 DublinNationwas 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 theFreeman. 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 theFreeman. 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 theNation, 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 theNation, 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 theNation'sprospectus "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 theNationin 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.
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 theNew York Nation, patterned much after the DublinNation. 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 DublinNation. 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 stillRoused 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 theNation, went to Boston, and in August, 1850, established his second paper, theAmerican Celt.
During the next seven years, his career was that of an itinerant and rather restless journalist. In 1851 he was publishing theCelt, 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 YorkTribune, 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 theCelt, 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 domainRejoices under Freedom's reignWhere 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 theCelt, "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 theCelt, 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 theNew Eraas 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, theNew Erahas 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 hisNew 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.
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 theParti 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 theBleus, 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 theParti 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 theRouges, 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 theBleusan 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. TheRouges, 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 theBleus. 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 theGlobewrote 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 TorontoLeaderand theCatholic Witnessof 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 YorkNation, 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 TorontoGlobe, 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 theGlobe"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 theNew 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.