L

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE AND TRAINING

1815 TO 1844

IKE many other men who have won distinction in building up the empire abroad, the future premier of the Dominion was of Scottish birth. His ancestors, respectable merchants or farmers, had the usual traditional links with a remote past, but nothing apparently to distinguish them from other Highland families. His father, Mr. Hugh Macdonald, was a native of Sutherlandshire who had removed as a young man from his native village in the north to Glasgow, where he became a manufacturer in a small way, and was married to Miss Helen Shaw of that city, also of Highland descent. Of this marriage there were born five children, of whom John Alexander, the subject of this biography, was the third. The date of his birth was January 11th, 1815, the year of Waterloo.

The lad was in the fifth year of his age when in 1820 his father, whose business ventures in Glasgow had not been successful, resolved to emigrate to Canada.

Thus, while his extraction was Scottish, his whole training was essentially Canadian. His boy

ish inspirations came from the country which he was to consolidate and rule.

The family settled first in the town of Kingston, in the province of Ontario, then the most important military post and social centre of Upper Canada. The early attempts of the father to find a business footing in Kingston having failed, the family removed in succession to two of the small neighbouring settlements, Hay Bay and Stone Mills, on the Bay of Quinté. The years spent there seem to have been equally unsuccessful, from a business point of view, and in 1836 Mr. Macdonald returned to Kingston, where he was appointed to a position in the Commercial Bank. Here his health began to fail and he died five years later, in 1841, at the age of fifty-nine.

Though evidently unstable in purpose and unequal to the rough work of a new country, Mr. Macdonald seems to have been a man of some ability and a kindly heart, with a keen desire, truly Scottish, that his children should get education. But it is evident that the son owed little of his great qualities to paternal heredity. His mother, who lived until 1862, was of stronger fibre, and was apparently the binding force which held the family together through many anxious years. She is described as a woman of great intellectual vigour and strong personality, quiet in manner and with a keen sense of humour. Her son was devoted to her, and as she lived to the age of eighty-five,

SCHOOL DAYS

she watched the earlier stages of his brilliant

career.

Meanwhile the lad had been for five years, between the ages of ten and fifteen, a pupil at the Kingston Grammar School. In this brief space was compressed his whole formal education, beyond what had been received at elementary schools. Even school life must have been weighted with anxieties. "I had no boyhood," he once said to a friend. "From the age of fifteen I began to earn my own living."

But already at school one quality which marked the man-that of winning the affection of those around him—seems to have asserted itself in the boy. "I like to remember those early school days when John Macdonald and myself were pupils at the same school, he being one of the older boys and I one of the younger," said Sir Oliver Mowat at the unveiling of Macdonald's statue in 1895. "He was as popular with the boys then as he afterwards became with men."

Of university training he had none. The circumstance was to him a matter of lasting regret; but it is one which brings out in stronger relief the natural ability and energy of a mind which triumphed over the deficiencies of education, and held its own among men of the highest culture. Omnivorous reading, to which he was passionately addicted to the end of his career, became the substitute for a university course.

On leaving school in 1830, he at once entered upon the study of law in the office of Mr. George Mackenzie, a friend of his father with whom he lodged. His school-boy age at this time suggests the duties of a junior clerk or office boy rather than serious legal study. Apparently during the whole course of his law studies he was earning his own living and probably assisting his family, so that he must have received wages for his office work.

He seems to have inspired confidence almost at once, for as early as 1832, while still a young student, he was sent to look after the business of a branch office opened at Napanee, and in 1833 he went, by arrangement with Mr. Mackenzie, to Picton to take charge of the law office of Mr. L. P. Macpherson, in the absence of that gentleman from Canada.

For a political career the experience thus gained was doubtless most valuable. The practice of a country lawyer in Canada brings him into singularly close touch with the difficulties and needs, the passions, prejudices and peculiarities of the farming population which forms the political backbone of the country. For the special work lying before him, this training perhaps meant as much as any that even a university could give.

Of these early years of struggle and hard work little has been brought to light worthy of special record as illustrating the character of the young man, or as giving clear indication of the great

STUDENT AND BARRISTER

career which awaited him. Few men of equal mark in later life have had a youth so devoid of memorable incident.

There are suggestions in fragments of correspondence that he had not only secured the trust of his employers, but had also attracted the special interest of others beside those under whom he worked. A cheerful disposition, joined to industrious habits, appears to have made him a favourite in the small circle in which he moved. His life at this stage was the life of many an ambitious and energetic law student in Canada to-day: a round of ordinary office duties, lightened by the pleasant social intercourse of a stirring provincial

town.

The exceptional qualities of leadership which marked his later career were to be developed in the slow process of time and events.

On February 6th, 1836, he was called to the bar and immediately opened an office in Kingston, thus entering upon the practice of the law on his own account at the early age of twentyone. Business seems to have come to him at once, partly no doubt from his previous connection with principals having a large practice, and partly through the impression which his abilities had already made on those who knew him.

That he had still to overcome the crudity and impetuosity of youth, a curious story shows. It is thus told by Mr. Pope: "In his first case, which