goodwill developed. It was a simple and ancient message, but one that McGee both in the United States and in Canada never failed to plead. The defence of his countrymen led him in 1845 to publish his first book, _Historical Sketches of O'Connell and His Friends_. It is written with the nervous eloquence and facility of all his later works. The most significant fact about it was the hero-worship which he lavished upon the great Irish liberator. "In him," he enthusiastically wrote, "liberty will boast a model for all her future reformers." In his later Canadian career McGee showed himself a consistent disciple of his hero of 1845. He was a follower of O'Connell in his implicit faith in attaining political visions by moving first the popular mind through oratory and the press. O'Connell is generally remembered as an agitator, but he was something more than the word ordinarily connotes. He was a political educator, and a political educator of O'Connell's type McGee always aspired to be. In the year which witnessed the publication of his eulogy of O'Connell, McGee's fame spread beyond Boston and its New England environs. Indeed, his articles on Repeal were read with keen and satisfied interest in the club rooms of Dublin. O'Connell himself paid him a compliment by publicly referring to his editorials as "the inspired writings of a young exiled Irish boy in America." John Gray, proprietor of the _Freeman's Journal_, which was O'Connell's pillar of support, considered McGee's journalistic talent worthy of enlistment in the service of his paper. He offered him a liberally paid position. The result was that McGee returned to Dublin. Only three years had elapsed since his departure, but they were years which had witnessed his rise from the position of a poor immigrant boy, not unlike thousands who yearly crossed in the steerage to be lost in the human eddies of American cities, to that of a newspaper editor with a reputation in America and a certain distinction in Ireland. The rapid pace of his rise measures in some degree his quantity of inborn talent and his determination to hew success from the most untoward circumstances.