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.