While McGee was thus assisting in the creation of the Canadian Dominion, the politics of Ireland once more began to intrude on his attention. Like many Irishmen it was his lot to be dogged in the land of his adoption by the gloomy history of his native country. In the sixties Fenianism emerged as a political force in Ireland and particularly in America, and from the outset McGee looked upon it with fear. Its fatal significance in his life makes it necessary to treat briefly the rise and progress of the movement. Following the famine of 1845, thousands of indigent Irishmen yearly emigrated to the United States, burdened with bitter memories of the starvation and the miseries that followed it. Between 1846 and 1851, more than one million persons died of hunger or its effects and more than one million quitted the country. In the succeeding years many thousands more were yearly evicted from their slender holdings by bankrupt landlords, anxious to sell their estates to rich graziers. These evicted also sought a subsistence on the other side of the Atlantic. Deep in the heart of each was a love of Ireland, and a hatred no less deep of England, whom the emigrant held responsible for the miseries of his country. In the fifties and sixties this hatred proved the nursing mother of Fenianism. The organizers of the movement were James Stephens, John O'Mahony, John O'Leary, and T. C. Luby. All of these men had been in one way or another implicated in the movement of 1848, although none so prominently as McGee. The two most dynamic characters were Stephens and O'Mahony. None can doubt their genuine love for Ireland. Their ideal of gaining its independence accompanied them when they fled as fugitive rebels to Paris. In 1850, they separated, O'Mahony going to New York and Stephens eventually returning to Ireland, but neither lost his youthful dream of Irish freedom. In the following years it led them into the shadowy paths of conspiracy. In America O'Mahony established the Fenian Brotherhood, named after the Fianna or Fenians who in early centuries were soldiers devoted to the cause of Ireland. He adopted the name as suitable for the men whom he was organizing for the championship of the national cause by secret enterprise and warfare. In Ireland Stephens developed a society on similar lines, but his secret army from the outset was handicapped by lack of funds. The movement on both sides of the Atlantic made little headway until the closing period of the American Civil War. It then loomed into supreme significance. In the southern and northern armies were thousands of Irish. An Irish brigade, fighting for the north, had won the highest laurels on many a contested field. On the conclusion of the war these hardened veterans were eager to turn their bayonets to the cause of freeing Ireland, and they swelled the Fenian ranks. At Boston, in 1865, O'Mahony boldly proclaimed their aim. "Ours is