He had meanwhile been joined by his young wife and infant daughter. His prospects during these months were exceedingly problematical. In 1850, however, he removed to Boston and began to publish the _American Celt_, a paper which was of precisely the same cast as the defunct _New York Nation_ had been. It was full to the brim of hatred and rancour against Great Britain, and its "mission" seemed to be to influence all the evil passions of the Irish race in America. By degrees, however, Thomas D'Arcy McGee began to feel the influence of the civilized atmosphere in which his life was passing. He figured conspicuously on the lecture platform, and was necessarily brought into contact with men of good intellect and high principles. These persons felt and expressed respect for his abilities, but declined to sympathize with, or even to discuss, the merits of English rule in Ireland. They tacitly refused to consider that subject as an absorbing theme for discussion on this continent. He received much wise counsel, the tenor of which led him, for the first time in his life, to reflect seriously upon the errors of his past career. He was apt enough to learn, and gradually the idea began to dawn upon his mind that all the wisdom and justice in the world are not confined to Irish bosoms. He began to perceive that there are nobler passions in the human heart than revenge, and that if a man cannot make circumstances conformable to his mind, the first thing in his power is to conform his mind to his circumstances. "The cant of faction," says Mrs. Sadlier, "the fiery denunciations that, after all, amounted to nothing, he began to see in their true colours; and with his whole heart he then and ever after aspired to elevate the Irish people, not by impracticable Utopian schemes of revolution, but by teaching them to make the best of the hard fate that made them the subjects of a foreign power differing from them in race and in religion; to cultivate among them the arts of peace, and to raise themselves, by the ways of peaceful industry and increasing enlightenment, to the level even of the more prosperous sister-island."