: Sir Wilfrid Laurier by McArthur Peter - Laurier Wilfrid Sir 1841-1919

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BY PETER McARTHUR

"NOW IS THE STATELY COLUMN BROKE, THE BEACON LIGHT IS QUENCHED IN SMOKE, THE TRUMPET'S SILVER VOICE IS STILL, THE WARDER SILENT ON THE HILL!"

J. M. DENT & SONS, LIMITED LONDON TORONTO PARIS: J. M. DENT ET FILS

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my fellow-writers of the Canadian Press. The merits of the book are due to their efforts for I have helped myself lavishly to their best brains.

I have long been of the opinion that a genius is a man who knows a good thing when he steals it, and this is the first time I have had a chance to steal on an ambitious scale. I have stolen much, and if I had had more time, I would have stolen more.

PETER MCARTHUR. TORONTO, MARCH 19TH., 1919.

ERRATA. Page 119, line 17, word "conquer" should read "contend"

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's mother, n?e 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.

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