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.