The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4)Dent, John Charles
History
The Canadian Portrait Gallery - Volume 3 (of 4)
Dent, John Charles
Canada -- Biography
forces against which he contended in vain. He lost caste with the better
class of his fellow-countrymen in America, and came to be regarded by
them as an unsafe mentor. According to their view of the matter, a Roman
Catholic who set himself up to criticize the clergy of his Church was
little better than an atheist. He was a man to be shunned, and, if
necessary, to be put down. The upshot of the controversy was the ruin of
the prospects of Mr. McGee's journal, the publication whereof was soon
discontinued.
He had meanwhile been joined by his young wife and infant daughter. His
prospects during these months were exceedingly problematical. In 1850,
however, he removed to Boston and began to publish the _American Celt_,
a paper which was of precisely the same cast as the defunct _New York
Nation_ had been. It was full to the brim of hatred and rancour against
Great Britain, and its "mission" seemed to be to influence all the evil
passions of the Irish race in America. By degrees, however, Thomas
D'Arcy McGee began to feel the influence of the civilized atmosphere in
which his life was passing. He figured conspicuously on the lecture
platform, and was necessarily brought into contact with men of good
intellect and high principles. These persons felt and expressed respect
for his abilities, but declined to sympathize with, or even to discuss,
the merits of English rule in Ireland. They tacitly refused to consider
that subject as an absorbing theme for discussion on this continent. He
received much wise counsel, the tenor of which led him, for the first
time in his life, to reflect seriously upon the errors of his past
career. He was apt enough to learn, and gradually the idea began to dawn
upon his mind that all the wisdom and justice in the world are not
confined to Irish bosoms. He began to perceive that there are nobler
passions in the human heart than revenge, and that if a man cannot make
circumstances conformable to his mind, the first thing in his power is
to conform his mind to his circumstances. "The cant of faction," says
Mrs. Sadlier, "the fiery denunciations that, after all, amounted to
nothing, he began to see in their true colours; and with his whole heart
he then and ever after aspired to elevate the Irish people, not by
impracticable Utopian schemes of revolution, but by teaching them to
make the best of the hard fate that made them the subjects of a foreign
power differing from them in race and in religion; to cultivate among
them the arts of peace, and to raise themselves, by the ways of peaceful
industry and increasing enlightenment, to the level even of the more
prosperous sister-island."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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