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."