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The following is excerpted from The Montreal Gazette article Fathers of a Resilient Country: Sir John A. Macdonald and D’Arcy McGee understood Canada.
The concluding, second volumes of two biographies – Richard Gwyn’s of John A. Macdonald, and David A. Wilson’s of Thomas D’Arcy McGee – make clear how the new country’s potentially divisive features were understood fully from the outset by these two men, and how their political gifts were necessary, even indispensable, not only in creating Canada, but in giving it many of its permanent features.
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Wilson has a different purpose. He demonstrates persuasively that D’Arcy McGee, erratic but often brilliant, was the poet, the orator and the most profound thinker of Canadian colonial politics. While Macdonald was a supreme practitioner of politics as the art of the possible, McGee was a representation incarnate of all the conflicts and reconciliations of religion, language, ethnicity and religion in 19th-century British North America. Each man’s life was a cavalcade of heroic moments, ingenious stratagems, disastrous but temporary setbacks, struggles with family tragedy and performances of theatrical comedy.
McGee detested the popular American stereotypical images of “Paddy” Irishmen; as he hopped back and forth among Ireland, Canada, and the United States, the combination of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry he encountered in the U.S. on the one side, and the fanaticism and violence he loathed in the Irish-American Fenian revolutionaries on the other, largely explained why he eventually became an ardent Canadian and supporter of British constitutional monarchism. He was deeply Catholic and a touch mystical, marvelously eloquent and funny, with an unfortunate weakness for alcohol.
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