Rt. Hon. Arthur Meighen: The story of a nation’s heroes is the fountain from which it draws the wine of its later life. There is no inspiration that quickens the ambition of youth, stimulates public service and deepens love of country like the memory of great men who have gone.

England has erected her empire of today around the names of Cromwell, of Bacon, of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Pitt, and Burke, and Wellington, and Canning, and a hundred other luminous figures who have adorned her past. The flames of Italian patriotism have been fed for generations at the shrine of Cavour, of Garibaldi, and of Mazzini, and in France there is not a home that has resounded with the praises of Charlemagne, of Colbert, of Richelieu, and of Napoleon; while in the United States, the perfection of modern democracy, tens of millions of citizens do homage to the memory of Washington, of Franklin, of Marshall, of Lincoln, and of Grant.

Canada has now reached a time when the lives at least of her founders have receded out of politics into history. There are no controversies of today which date back to the era of Confederation—nothing left now to distort the perspective with which we can view the men of that time and measure their powers, their motives, and their achievements. There are some of those giants who have stood every test, who have grown in stature through half a century of criticism and whose place in our annals is now forever secure. One of these is Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

With unreserved enthusiasm I congratulate the authors of tonight’s event—and particularly Honourable Charles Murphy to whom we owe its inception and to whose driving power we certainly owe its success. It will be a good thing for the national spirit of Canada; it will help develop a real national personality when we can all join in veneration of the great deeds of the fathers of our country.

It will help marvelously the cause of unity in this Dominion when all of us can realize that we as well as other nations have our patriarchs, men and women who have lived great lives, given to their country the last full measure of devotion and left an inheritance of fame which is to every province a common treasure and a common pride. Here we are gathered in hundreds three score years after the death of D’Arcy McGee and we are going to see to it, if we can, that this great Irishman, this great Irishman, this great missionary of Ireland, this far greater Canadian and missionary of empire, comes at last into his own.

D’Arcy McGee was Irish in lineage and nativity, but in every element of his character, in every vein of his being, in every bud and blossom of his personality he was more Irish still; all that the world admires in that race he possessed, a fine generous nature, a delicate sensibility, a passion for the beautiful in everything, in language, in landscape, in literature, in the deeds and thoughts of men. His imaginative gifts added the sheen of beauty to his writings and his speeches; but they did more than that; their spell upon him was so great that they commanded his course in public affairs. Wherever McGee the statesman went, McGee the orator was there, and McGee the poet was not far away.

His boyhood mind was nourished in the most revolutionary of Irish schools. As a talented young man, he was drawn into the company of a set of brilliant intellectuals, a group of daring spirits who planned by a combination of oratory and shotguns to overthrow British power. He trained his eloquence by matching flights with Thomas Francis Meagher, who with the possible exception of Emmett, was the most vivid and spectacular of anti-British platform warriors in the last century.

With this beginning he set out for America, carried his shining sword into journalism and determined to establish himself in the new world as the special guardian and tribune of his race. But the mind of D’Arcy McGee, while brilliant and imaginative, was fundamentally intelligent, receptive to reason and responsive to experience. He served his people devotedly every hour of his sojourn in the United States, but he soon came to the conclusion that human frailty was not confined to old England, that a republican government had no monopoly of liberty, and that the grievances which had racked his soul under British rule had their counterpart in other lands and were after all not such as should be removed by revolt and revolution, but by the far more certain process of constitutional reform. In this feeling he turned his footsteps to the British flag again, took up his abode in Montreal, and gave to this country the last and best decade of his life.

For the task which was awaiting him in Canada, D’Arcy McGee was wonderfully equipped. The young colony had been torn by feuds and schisms, the bickering of rival races. Cliques into which men were divided and sub-divided had brought the Act of Union of 1841 into a condition of unworkable futility. The Atlantic colonies were isolated and unhappy, and were seeking access to our larger western populations. People generally were weary of the crudities and bitternesses political strife.

Into all this the fresh, buoyant spirit of McGee came like sunshine after a night of storm. Free from the antipathies of either faction, but with an intelligent sympathy for both, he set himself to preach the evangel of unity, and through all the changing phases of our pre-confederation struggles he pressed cheerfully and dauntlessly on. A relentless militant in other lands, he became a tireless peacemaker in ours.

He caught at once the vision of a great confederation—the union of our provinces in a federal system; this ideal seized his intellect and took possession of his heart; he saw in it the one plan and the only plan of salvation, and to bring about such a union he consecrated all the resources with which he was endowed.

With Upper and Lower Canada struggling to work together, but jealously gathering into rival camps divided by speech and creed, it was a tremendous event to have a man arrive who was a peerless master of language of the one and a devoted disciple of the religion of the other. At a time when our maritime East and maritime West were further apart than the antipodes are today, it was a wonderful thing that a man should appear whose faith in British institutions had been tried in the furnace of experience and who believed with the ardour of a crusader that the genius of those institutions could weld these sundered colonies into one.

The picture of a united Canada which filled the mind of D’Arcy McGee captivated his whole being. He could see nothing but the grandeur of a great young nation towering over the asperities of sectional strife, divisions obliterated, hostilities quieted, distance annihilated, the mountains of the Pacific offering shelter to the harbours of the Atlantic. He could see under union a national culture developed, a national literature nourished; he could see the exposed and straggling limbs of British dominion on this continent gathered into one living frame as guarantee against American absorption. Standing before an enchanted legislature in 1860 he said:

“I look to the future of my adopted country with hope, though not without anxiety; I see in the not remote distance, one great nationality bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean—I see it quartered into many communities—each disposing of its internal affairs—but all bound together by free institutions, free intercourse, and free commerce; I see within the round of that shield, the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves—the winding Assiniboine, the five-fold lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Saguenay, the St. John, and the Basin of Minas—by all these flowing waters, in all the valleys they fertilize, in all the cities they visit in their courses, I see a generation of industrious, contented, moral men, free in name and in fact—men capable of maintaining, in peace and in war, a constitution worthy of such a country.”

His voice rang through the whole inhabited area of Canada. An eloquence which had thrilled audiences in Ireland before he was twenty, which had defied British power in the hectic halls of Dublin, which had challenged and conquered hostile parties in the great republic, was turned in the full glow of its maturity into a mighty summons athwart British America to give birth to a British nation. The fiery insurrectionist of Carlingford had become the incomparable evangelist of empire.

To Sir John Macdonald and Sir George Etienne Cartier it was given to stand at the front of those men who are known now, and justly known, as fathers of our country. Close around them were George Brown, Tilley and Tupper. It was these men whose skill in the management of parties, whose experience as men of affairs, whose understanding of the unquenchable aspirations of minorities, whose patience through years of adversity and unbending determination to succeed enabled, at last, the lines of our constitution to be settled and the foundations of this Dominion to be laid. To them all honour is due and to them throughout our history increasing honour will be done. But if Macdonald and Cartier were the architects of Confederation, D’Arcy McGee was its prophet. He it was who in its grandest form caught the vision splendid; he it was who spread everywhere the fervor with which he was himself consumed; he it was whose restless pen and matchless platform power carried right into the hearts of the masses his message of tolerance and good will. It was D’Arcy McGee who was the triumphant missionary of union.

The full harvest of what our fathers sowed has been slow to ripen. Still, it is true, and only the voice of unthinking ingratitude can deny, that in these fifty years we have garnered much. The obstacles encountered have been greater than we had believed, but they have been as nothing when compared with the obstacles and dangers which by our union we surmounted. And if in these later days we feel again the pains of sectional dissension and there are searchings of heart about our future, let us put on the armour of men of old who fought the same dragons in far more perilous array; let us look back across the span of two generations and watch the bold, brave figures of the captains of that time; let us learn from their patience and emulate their courage and highly resolve to enrich by our devotion the noble heritage they have handed down.

And when distrust moves among us to estrange race from race, or class from class, or to whisper in our ear that we are not our brothers’ keeper, let us listen over the hills to the reverberating eloquence, the lofty patriotism, the warm-hearted toleration, the wholesome wisdom of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.caption id="attachment_3360641" align="alignnone" width="194" D’Arcy McGee statue/captionArthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.