A fortunate combination of circumstances took
him out of the struggle for a place at the Montreal bar and gave
him a practice in the country combined with the editorship of a
Liberal weekly, a position which made him at once a figure of some
local prominence. Laurier's personal charm and obvious capacity for
politics marked him at once for local leadership. At the age of 30
he was sent to the Quebec legislature as representative of the
constituency of Drummond and Arthabaska; and three years later he
went to Ottawa. The rapid retirement of the Rouge leaders, Dorion
and Fournier to the bench and Letellier to the lieutenant-governorship
of Quebec, opened the way for early promotion, and in 1877
he entered the cabinet of Alex. Mackenzie and assumed at the
same time the leadership of the French Liberals. Defeated in
Drummond-Arthabaska upon seeking re-election he was taken to its
heart by Quebec East and continued to represent that constituency
for an unbroken period of forty years. He went out of office with
Mackenzie in 1878, and thereafter his career which had begun so
promisingly dwindled almost to extinction until the events already
noted called him back to the lists and opened for him the doors of
opportunity.

When Wilfrid Laurier went to Montreal in 1861 he began the study of
law in the office of Rodolphe Laflamme, a leading figure in the
Rouge political group; and he joined L'Institut Canadien already far
advanced in the struggle with the church which was later to result
in open warfare. Those two acts revealed his political affiliations
and fixed the environment in which he was to move during the plastic
twenties. Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men,
infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which
Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed
the constituencies of Lower Canada and had appeared in the
parliament of Canada as a radical, free-thinking, ultra-Democratic
party, bearing proudly the badge of "Rouge"; and the passage of time
was beginning to temper their views with a tinge of sobriety. The
church, however, had them all in her black books and Bishop Bourget,
that incomparable zealot and bigot, was determined to destroy them
politically and spiritually, to whip them into submission. The
struggle raged chiefly in the sixties about L'Institut Canadien,
frowned upon by the church because it had books in its library which
were banned by the Index and bec