Sir Wilfrid Laurier
The length of Sir Wilfrid’s public career alone challenges admiration and respect. He had been almost half a century in active politics; forty-six years a salient figure in Parliament; a leader of the Liberal party for thirty years; Prime Minister for fifteen years. He saw generations of men and generations of statesmen. He saw Confederation in its cradle and watched it grow to nationhood. Since he entered public life England has had three Monarchs, while the figures of Disraeli and Gladstone, of Salisbury and Campbell-Bannerman have passed across its national stage. He witnessed the rise of Cavour and saw the sword of Garibaldi flash, and he sympathized with their aspirations for an United Italy. He saw the German States confederated by Bismarck into blood and iron, saw France, his Motherland, crushed and bleeding at the feet of the Teuton conqueror, and lived to see the structure which Bismarck reared crumbled into utter dust. Since he entered public life, Russia has had two Emperors, emancipated its slaves, fought three great wars, overthrown the House of Czars and plunged into anarchy and ruin. France has been an Empire and a Republic, and countless rulers and statesmen have appeared and vanished from her national life. During that period the United States has developed into a great power, fought four wars, and the figures of Lincoln and Grant, of Blaine and Garfield, of McKinley and Roosevelt, have left their imprint and passed away. Meanwhile the British Empire has grown and expanded in size and strength and liberty, and Canada, from the feeble infancy into which the Fathers of Confederation tried to infuse the vitality of unity, has become the great Dominion of 1919. And during all those years, while rulers have come and gone, while statesmen have flourished and faded, while empires have sprung up or been destroyed, Sir Wilfrid remained a central figure on the international stage.
Wilfrid Laurier was born at St. Lin, Quebec, on November 20th., 1841, of a family that had settled in Lower Canada, six generations before. His forebears came from Anjou, France, and originally bore the family name of Cottineau. A marriage contract, drawn up in Montreal in 1666, bears the signature of the first representative of the family in Canada—Francois Cottineau, dit Champlauriet, or translated literally, Francis Cottineau, said, or called, Champlauriet. Apparently this latter appellation was subsequently adopted by the family, and after Louis XIV had, by royal decree, proclaimed the land to be French territory. They first established themselves in the forest of Ile Jesus, an island immediately north of the Island of Montreal, and at the mouth of the Ottawa River, and a little later removed to the Parish of Lechenaie, on the north bank of the same river. Charles Laurier, the grandfather of Sir Wilfrid was a man of remarkable energy and ability, and in the face of many obstacles taught himself surveying, and was master of mathematics in his scholastic district. At the beginning of the 19th. century he established his son, Carolus Laurier, on farm land which he had cleared in the bush near the little village of St. Lin, which nestles in the foothills of the Laurentide range, north of Montreal. Carolus Laurier, like his father, was a surveyor by profession, and a farmer by habit, and followed both occupations to his best advantage. He wanted some of the strong personality of his father, but was of a generous and friendly nature, and of an inventive turn of mind, as is evidenced by the fact that he was the first person in the colony to devise what then passed for a threshing machine, and which replaced the flail, which he had inherited from his father. Born in a quiet backwoods settlement, Carolus Laurier was a radical in the strongest sense of the word, and perhaps it was the father who laid the foundations of the son’s political faith. In one respect Carolus Laurier is particularly deserving of praise. He was sufficiently acute to realize that his son had unusual aptitudes, and to make the best of those mental endowments provided him with a good classical education. In those days this was no light undertaking for a man of the station and means of Carolus Laurier. The father realized, too, that it would be of inestimable advantage to this son to have a thorough knowledge of the English language, and of English customs, and to this end he carefully directed the son’s education.
Wilfrid Laurier’s mother, née Marcelle Martineau, was a relative of the mother of the French-Canadian poet Frechette, one of the most gifted sons of Lower Canada, and it may be that the same family strain which produced the poet, showed itself in another way in the unusual qualities of the French-Canadian statesman. Five years after Wilfrid Laurier was born his mother passed away. Some time after Carolus Laurier married Adelaine Ethier, and she brought up young Wilfrid. The second offspring of the first marriage, Malvina Laurier, died at an early age. Of the second marriage, three sons were born: Uheld, a physician, who died at Arthabaska in 1898; Charlemagne, merchant, and until his death in 1907, member for the county of Ottawa, and Henri, prothonotary of Arthabaska, who died in 1906. Carolus Laurier, the father, died in 1881.
Young Laurier commenced his studies in the parochial school of St. Lin, where he learned reading and writing and the rudiments of arithmetic. His father then decided to extend his son’s horizon so as to permit of his seeing something of the life and learning the language of his English compatriots. About eight miles west of St. Lin, and on the bank of the river Achigan, is the village of New Glasgow. This settlement was established about 1820 by a number of Scotch Protestants who came to Canada with English regiments. Carolus Laurier had done surveying in this neighbourhood and was well acquainted with many of the families, and thus an arrangement to have his son resident among them for a period was easily brought about. Shortly after young Wilfrid Laurier was a figure in the intimate life of the Murrays, the Guthries, the Macleans, the Bennetts and other families of the settlement. For a time he boarded with an Irish Catholic family, named Kirk, and later he lived with the Murrays, giving, in return for lodging and food, his services as a clerk in the general store kept by the head of the household.
The school which young Laurier attended for two terms, 1852-53 and 1853-54, was brusquely closed during the first term because of the departure for other parts of the teacher, one Thompson. He was quickly replaced by a man of considerable rough talent, one, “Sandy” Maclean, who possessed a pronounced and good taste for literature, and who in many ways made an admirable teacher. His young French-Canadian pupil, learning English at play, at work, at home and at school, aroused in the good Scot a kindly concern, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier in later years never failed to attribute his knowledge of English literature to the man who first opened his eyes to the wealth of English letters.
These two years at New Glasgow proved of inestimable benefit to young Laurier. Not only did he secure a good foundation for further study of the English language, but he had inculcated in him a broadness of vision, an understanding of his English compatriots and a spirit of tolerance and good will, which ever afterwards proved a great asset. In September, 1854, at the age of thirteen years, Wilfrid Laurier was sent to college at L’Assomption. There he passed seven rigorous years of study. His health was delicate, and his physique did not permit of his taking part in the ordinary sports of his fellow-students. His favourite recreation was to visit the village court house when the judicial assizes were in progress and to listen there to the pleadings of the village lawyers. Sir Wilfrid often recalled of this period of his life that a contradictory meeting of two political opponents always afforded him the keenest enjoyment. In fact, in his anxiety to miss none of such delightful and auspicious events as court sessions and public meetings he often ran foul of the school authorities.
Wilfrid Laurier’s mother died when the boy was but six years old. His earlier years were spent under the constant supervision of the village curé. He knew no language but the French. St. Lin slept quite a distance from the centre of the earth—Montreal. It heard only echoes of the outer world. But like every other French-Canadian village, it had its church, its curé, and its dream. It prayed for a French-Canadian Messiah.