Читать книгу Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - Oscar Douglas Skelton - Страница 11

The school discipline at L'Assomption was strict. The boys rose at 5:30, and every hour had its task or was set aside for meal-time or play-time. The college had not then built a refectory, and the students, though rooming in the college buildings, scattered through the town for their meals. Every Sunday, garbed in blue and black coat, collegian's cap, and blue sash, all attended the parish church; on week-days only the sash was worn. Once a week, on Thursday afternoons, there came a welcome half-holiday excursion to the country, usually to a woods belonging to the college a few miles away. [5] These excursions young Laurier enjoyed to the full, but he was not able to take much part in the more strenuous games of his comrades. The weakness which was to beset his early manhood was already developing, and violent exercise had been forbidden. His recreation took other forms. The literary part of the course, the glories of Roman and French and English literature, made a deep appeal to him. He took his full share in the warm and dogmatic discussions in which groups of the keener youngsters settled the problems of life and politics raised by their reading or echoed from the world outside. Sometimes a nearer glimpse was given of the activities of that outer world. Assize courts were held twice a year, and when election-time came round, joint debates between the rival candidates at the church door after Sunday mass or from improvised street platforms on a week-day evening were unalloyed delight. More than once he broke bounds to drink in the fiery eloquence of advocate or politician, well content to purchase a stimulating hour with the punishment that followed.

Wilfrid Laurier had come to L'Assomption with a strong leaning toward Liberalism. His father's freely spoken views, discussions of his elders overheard in St. Lin and New Glasgow, echoes of the eloquence of the great tribune Papineau, the reading of the history of Canada which Garneau had written to belie Durham's charge that French-speaking Canada had no literature, had awakened political interest and given him the bent which his own temperament and his later reading confirmed. If the seed had not been vital and deeply planted, his Liberalism could scarcely have survived the Conservative atmosphere of L'Assomption. When the French-Canadian majority which had fought solidly for self-government divided, once self-government was attained, into Liberals and Conservatives, the great mass of the clergy, as will be noted later, took the Conservative turning. The college authorities and the great majority of his fellow-students looked with more than suspicion on his political heresies. When a debating society which young Laurier had helped to organize ventured on still more dangerous ground, taking up the highly contentious theme over which historians have shed quarts of ink: "Resolved, that in the interests of Canada the French kings should have permitted the Huguenots to settle here," and when the student from St. Lin took the affirmative and pressed his points home, the scandalized préfet d'études intervened, and there was no more debating at L'Assomption. Yet these differences were not serious. The relations between teachers and pupils were very friendly. Young Laurier was soon recognized as the most promising student of his time, and it was with pride that the authorities and his fellows chose him to make the orations or read the addresses on state occasions.

Students of all political tendencies and of none were graduated from L'Assomption. It was the alma mater, though in the days before the rise of parties (1835-42), of the giant Rouge tribune, Joseph Papin, le gros canon du parti démocratique, who is still commemorated in the college halls, with laudable impartiality, as vir statura, voce et dialectica potens, and of Léon Simeon Morin (1841-48), his brilliant Conservative opponent, who shot like a fiery meteor across the political sky of Canada. Louis A. Jetté, founder of the Parti National which sought to reconcile Liberalism and the Church, and later an eminent judge, left L'Assomption the year before Wilfrid Laurier entered. Arthur Dansereau, for many years the leading Conservative journalist in Quebec, was a year his junior, while in his last year there entered a young lad from Lanoraie whose path was to cross his many a time in the future, the stormy petrel of Quebec politics, J. Israel Tarte.

The seven years soon passed and the momentous day of graduation came. Of the twenty-three members of his class (the 22nd "course") only nine completed the seven years. The interests of the class were well divided. Of the later career of three, two of whom went to the Western States, no record is available. Of the other twenty, three became barristers (avocats) and three notaries, these six providing the three who won legislative honours; four became priests, four doctors, and three farmers, two entered business, and one died while at school.

Wilfrid Laurier's ambitions had long been turned toward law, and when he left L'Assomption at the age of nineteen it was with the purpose of beginning immediately to study for the bar. The leading law school of Canada was then the Faculty of Law at McGill University. It had a strong staff of judges and of barristers in active practice, and the offices of the city gave ample opportunity for training in the routine of law. The law faculty of Laval University, Montreal, it may be noted, was not established until 1878.

To Montreal, then, Wilfrid Laurier journeyed in the fall of 1861, with high hopes but some foreboding as to what life in a large city would mean. He found a place in the office of Rodolphe Laflamme, one of the leaders of the Montreal bar and a very aggressive Rouge or advanced Liberal. The salary paid, though small, was a very welcome supplement to the funds his father had been able to advance.

The three-year course, which led to the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law, covered not only the basic systems of our jurisprudence, the civil law of Rome and the common law of England, but the developments which custom and legislators and code-makers had brought about in English-speaking and French-speaking Canada. The lectures were given in English or French, according to the mother tongue of the speaker. Mr. Laurier, with his New Glasgow training and his later reading, had no great difficulty in following the English lectures. He had more trouble at first in understanding the Latin phrases in the lectures on Roman law delivered by Justice Torrance, for at that time the English pronunciation of Latin was almost the universal rule among English-speaking scholars. Hon. J. J. C. Abbott, dean of the faculty, and destined thirty years later to become in a party emergency Prime Minister of Canada, was a sound and authoritative teacher of commercial law. Rodolphe Laflamme taught customary law and the law of real estate, and Hon. Wm. Badgeley and E. C. Carter criminal law. Throughout, Wilfrid Laurier ranked high in his work, though for the comfort of those students who gather instances of men succeeding in examinations and failing in the sterner tests of life, it may be noted that the one man who ranked higher was never heard of again. In his first and again in his third year, he stood second in general proficiency, and at graduation was first in the thesis required of all candidates for the degree. He was accordingly chosen to give the valedictory. It is not customary to find in student valedictories mature and original contributions to the philosophy of life. The address given on this occasion had its share of the rhetoric of youth, but it was a really notable utterance. The young valedictorian sketched a picture, somewhat idealized perhaps, of the lawyer's place in the nation's life, forecasting in more than one particular the principles which were to guide his own public career. The duty and the opportunity of the lawyer to maintain private right, to uphold constitutional liberty, and to work for the harmony of the two races in Canada, were strongly emphasized in vigorous and glowing phrase.

Valedictories butter no parsnips. No time could be lost in seeking to make a living. Mr. Laurier was admitted to the bar of Quebec in 1864, and in October of that year began practice in Montreal as a member of the firm of Laurier, Archambault and Désaulniers. All three partners were keen and ambitious, but the city seemed well satisfied with the old established firms, and clients were few. Finding difficulty in tiding over the months of waiting, the partners dissolved in April, 1865. Mr. Laurier then formed a partnership with Médéric Lanctot. Lanctot was a fiery and brilliant speaker, of unbounded energy and audacity, but poorly ballasted with judgment and fated for all his lavish endowment to wreck his career. The partners were curiously assorted—the older man eager, passionate, fond of lively company, ready to debate any question in heaven above or earth beneath; the younger, reserved, retiring, firmly rooted in his convictions but calm and balanced in their defence. Lanctot was absorbed in politics, writing, speaking, organizing petitions against Cartier's Confederation policy. Laurier was left to carry on most of the work of the office. Their rooms were the meeting place of an eager group of young lawyers, burning with opinion or phrases on the political issues of the day, and in Quebec fashion turning lightly from law to journalism. Ill-health and his reserve and moderation of temper kept Mr. Laurier from taking an active part in their discussions, but friendships were formed and opinions shaped which counted for much in after years.

The question of his health was in fact now giving him serious concern. Throat and lung trouble had developed, accompanied by serious hemorrhages. Many of his friends felt that a quiet country town would give a better fighting chance than a crowded city. Antoine Dorion, his most valued friend, and the Liberal leader in Canada East, [6] advised him to open a law office in the growing village of L'Avenir, in the Eastern Townships, and to combine with the law the editing of the weekly newspaper, "Le Défricheur," which Dorion's younger brother, Eric, had founded and managed until his death in 1866. Mr. Laurier felt that the advice was sound, and in November, 1866, he left Montreal for the little backwoods village. A brief residence convinced him that in spite of its optimistic name L'Avenir had no future, and accordingly he moved his newspaper and his law office to Victoriaville, thirty miles further east. While Victoriaville, as the railway centre of the district, became in time the chief business town, Mr. Laurier concluded that his law practice would flourish more securely in the judicial centre or, chef lieu of the district, St. Christophe, or, as it was later termed, Arthabaskaville, and early in 1867 he opened his office in the picturesque little town which was to be his home for the next thirty years. [7]

One further personal episode, and that the most important of his career, remains to be chronicled before surveying the beginnings of his public interests and activities in Montreal and the Townships.