With these audacious words he flung down the gage of battle to Fenianism, and the contest continued unabated to his death. From the outset his attitude placed him in peril. In the eyes of the more relentless Fenians, he was an apostate whose death would remove an obstacle to the triumph of their cause among the Canadian Irish. His visit to Ireland in the spring of 1865 added fuel to the hatred in which he was held. He had been sent over as Canadian representative to the international exhibition at Dublin, an honour he deeply appreciated. While visiting his father in Wexford, he delivered an address, far-reaching in its effects. Reviewing his past career in Ireland, he stated that the political aims of Young Ireland had been foolish--a sufficient evidence of apostacy which his warmest Irish friends did not welcome. But his remarks concerning the Irish Americans caused more resentment. He warned his audience that there was no national sympathy in the United States with Ireland and its struggle for autonomy, notwithstanding the rhetoric of Irish American orators. "In the United States there is no more sympathy for Ireland than for Japan, and far less than for Russia. In New England the people, tinctured with puritanism, proud of their property and of their education, hate the Irish emigrant for his creed, despise him for his poverty, and under-rate him for his want of book learning." These were unsavoury statements to those who lauded the institutions and people of republican America in contrast to those of the British colonies, and accompanied as they were with caustic remarks concerning the Irish leaders in the United States, they increased the odium in which McGee was held by his Fenian countrymen. The telegraph wires hurried his speech abroad, and in every quarter it created a sensation. The complimentary remarks of _The Times_--a very conservative organ in its attitude towards Ireland--were sufficient to condemn his address in the estimation of nationalist Irishmen. "We commend the speech of D'Arcy McGee at Wexford to the attention of all intending emigrants to America--to the attention of all the discontented classes in Ireland--to the attention of all who believe that there is anything to be gained by plots and conspiracies against the British government." The Dublin _Nation_, in whose columns McGee as a Young Irelander had written regularly, admitted regretfully a marked falling away from his attitude in 1848. "Irish nationalists of the generation which has entered public life since 1848 will surely be startled by the boldness and severity of Mr. McGee's judgments on men and movements amongst which he himself figured so prominently seventeen years ago.... They reveal a fact long known--and which indeed Mr. McGee has never affected to conceal--that of all the Young Ireland leaders, he has receded farthest in the rebound or reaction which followed upon the collapse of that unhappy year of revolutions."