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GOVERNORS-GENERAL OF THE DOMINION
         From photographs by Topley. "         48 VICE-REGAL CONSORTS
     From photographs by Topley. "         64 HONORÉ MERCIER
     From a photograph. "         90 SIR WILFRID LAURIER
         From a photograph by Topley. "       128 THE LIBERAL GOVERNMENT FORMED BY MR LAURIER IN 1896
     From photographs. "    168-9 SIR ROBERT BORDEN
     From a photograph by Montminy, Quebec. "       194 SIR WILFRID LAURIER IN ENGLAND, 1911
     From a photograph. "       294

CHAPTER I

THE MAKING OF A CANADIAN

Early days at St Lin—Seven years of college—Student at law—Arthabaska days

Wilfrid Laurier was born at St Lin, Quebec, on November 20, 1841. His ancestral roots were sunk deep in Canadian soil. For six generations Quebec had been the home of Laurier after Laurier. His kinsmen traced their origin to Anjou, a province that ever bred shrewd and thrifty men. The family name was originally Cottineau. In a marriage covenant entered into at Montreal in 1666 the first representative of the family in Canada is styled 'Francois Cottineau dit Champlauriet.' Evidently some ancestral field or garden of lauriers or oleanders gave the descriptive title which in time, as was common, became the sole family name. The Lauriers came to Canada shortly after Louis XIV took the colony under his royal wing in 1663, in the first era of real settlement, and hewed out homes for themselves in the forest, first on the island of Jesus, at the mouth of the Ottawa, and later in the parish of Lachenaie, on the north bank of the same river, where they grew in numbers until Lauriers, with Rochons and Matthieus, made up nearly all the parish.

Charles Laurier, grandfather of Wilfrid Laurier, was a man of strong character and marked ability. In face of many difficulties he mastered mathematics and became a self-taught land surveyor, so that he was able to make the surveys of the great Pangman seigneury at Lachenaie. Early in the nineteenth century he settled his son Carolus on a farm just hewn out of the forest, near the little village of St Lin, a frontier settlement nestling at the foot of the Laurentian hills north of Montreal. He himself continued to reside at Lachenaie until far on in years, when he went to live with his son at St Lin.

Carolus Laurier followed in his father's footsteps, surveying and farming by turns as opportunity offered. He had not his father's rugged individuality, but his handsome figure, his alert wit, and his amiable and generous nature made him a welcome guest through all the French and Scottish settlements in the north country. That he had something of his father's progressiveness is shown by the fact that he was the first farmer in the neighbourhood to set up a threshing machine in his barn, to take the place of the old-time flail. It was his liberal views that gave the first bent to his son's sympathies; and he was, as we shall see, progressive enough to give the brilliant lad the education needed for professional success, and far-seeing and broad-minded enough to realize how great an asset a thorough knowledge of English speech and English ways would be.

Yet it was rather to his mother that Wilfrid Laurier, like so many other notable men, owed his abilities and his temperament. Marcelle Martineau, kin to the mother of the poet Fréchette, was a woman of much strength of character, of fine mind and artistic talents. She lived only five years after her son was born, but in those few years she had so knit herself into his being that the warm and tender memory of her never faded from his impressionable mind. The only other child of this marriage, a daughter, Malvina, died in infancy. Carolus Laurier married again, his second wife being Adeline Ethier. She was much attached to his children and they to her. Of this second marriage three sons were born: Ubalde, who became a physician and died at Arthabaska in 1898; Charlemagne, a merchant in St Lin and later member for the county at Ottawa, who lived until 1907; and Henri, the prothonotary at Arthabaska, who passed away in 1906. Carolus Laurier himself lived on in his little village home forty years after the birth of his eldest son, and his wife lived nearly twenty years longer.

It was a quiet, strength-shaping country home in which the future statesman's boyhood was cast. The little village was off the beaten track of travel; not yet had the railway joined it to the river front. There were few distractions to excite or dissipate youthful energies. Roaming amid the brooding silence of the hills, fishing for trout, hunting partridges and rabbits, and joining in the simple village games, the boy took his boyish pleasures and built for his manhood's calm and power. His home had an intellectual atmosphere quite out of the ordinary, and it enjoyed a full measure of that grace or native courtesy which is not least among Quebec's contributions to the common Canadian stock.

He had his first schooling in the elementary parish school of St Lin, where the boys learned their A-B-C, their two-times-two, and their catechism. Then his father determined to give him a broader outlook by enabling him to see something of the way of life and to learn the tongue of his English-speaking compatriots. Some eight miles west of St Lin on the Achigan river lay the village of New Glasgow. It had been settled about 1820 by Scottish Protestants belonging to various British regiments. Carolus Laurier had carried on surveys there, knew the people well, and was thoroughly at home with them. The affinity so often noted between Scottish and French has doubtless more than a mere historical basis. At any rate, son, like father, soon found a place in the intimate life of the Murrays, the Guthries, the Macleans, the Bennetts and other families of the settlement. His experience was further varied by boarding for a time in the home of an Irish Catholic family named Kirk. Later,