eldest son Alphonso in the following year caused a division among the members of the house of Aragon. The new king, James, would have given up Sicily to the Angevine line with which he made peace and alliance, but his younger brother Fadrique accepted the crown offered him by the Sicilians, and fought for his own hand against both the Angevines and his senior. King James tried to force him to submission without success. Roger de Lauria adhered for a time to Fadrique, but his arrogant temper made him an intolerable supporter, and he appears, moreover, to have thought that he was bound to obey the king of Aragon. His large estates in Valencia gave him a strong reason for not offending that sovereign. He therefore left Fadrique, who confiscated his estates in Sicily and put one of his nephews to death as a traitor. For this Roger de Lauria took a ferocious revenge in two successive victories at sea over the Sicilians. When the war, which had become a ravening of wild beasts, was at last ended by the peace of Calatabellota, Roger de Lauria retired to Valencia, where he died on the 2nd of January 1305, and was buried, by his express orders, in the church of Santas Creus, a now deserted monastery of the Cistercians, at the feet of his old master Peter III. In his ferocity, and his combination of loyalty to his feudal lord with utter want of scruple to all other men, Roger belonged to his age. As a captain he was far above his contemporaries and his successors for many generations.
Signor Amari’s Guerra del Vespro Siciliano gives a general picture of these wars, but the portrait of Roger de Lauria must be sought in the Chronicle of the Catalan Ramon de Muntaner who knew him and was formed in his school. There is a very fair and well “documented” account of the masterly campaign of 1285 in Charles de la Roncière’s Histoire de la marine française, i. 189-217. (D. H.)
LAURIA, or Loria, a city of Basilicata, Italy, in the province
of Potenza, situated near the borders of Calabria, 712 m. by road
S. of Lagonegro. Pop. (1901) 10,470. It is a walled town on
the steep side of a hill with another portion in the plain below,
1821 ft. above sea-level. The castle was the birthplace of
Ruggiero di Loria, the great Italian admiral of the 13th century.
It was destroyed by the French under Masséna in 1806.
LAURIER, SIR WILFRID (1841– ), Canadian statesman,
was born on the 20th of November 1841, at St Lin in the province
of Quebec. The child of French Roman Catholic parents, he
attended the elementary school of his native parish and for eight
or nine months was a pupil of the Protestant elementary school
at New Glasgow in order to learn English; his association with
the Presbyterian family with whom he lived during this period
had a permanent influence on his mind. At twelve years of age
he entered L’Assomption college, and was there for seven years.
The college, like all the secondary schools in Quebec then available
for Roman Catholics, was under direct ecclesiastical control.
On leaving it he entered a law office at Montreal and took the
law course at McGill University. At graduation he delivered
the valedictory address for his class. This, like so many of his
later utterances, closed with an appeal for sympathy and union
between the French and English races as the secret of the future
of Canada. He began to practise law in Montreal, but owing to
ill-health soon removed to Athabaska, where he opened a law
office and undertook also to edit Le Défricheur, a newspaper then
on the eve of collapse. At Athabaska, the seat of one of the
superior courts of Quebec, the population of the district was fairly
divided between French- and English-speaking people, and
Laurier’s career was undoubtedly influenced by his constant
association with English-speaking people and his intimate
acquaintance with their views and aspirations.
While at Montreal he had joined the Institut Canadien, a literary and scientific society which, owing to its liberal discussions and the fact that certain books upon its shelves were on the Index expurgatorius, was finally condemned by the Roman Catholic authorities. Le Défricheur was an organ of extreme French sentiment, opposed to confederation, and also under ecclesiastical censure. One of its few surviving copies contains an article by Laurier opposing confederation as a scheme designed in the interest of the English colonies in North America, and certain to prove the tomb of the French race and the ruin of Lower Canada. The Liberals of Quebec under the leadership of Sir Antoine Dorion were hostile to confederation, or at least to the terms of union agreed upon at the Quebec conference, and Laurier in editorials and speeches maintained the position of Dorion and his allies. He was elected to the Quebec legislature in 1871, and his first speech in the provincial assembly excited great interest, on account of its literary qualities and the attractive manner and logical method of the speaker. He was not less successful in the Dominion House of Commons, to which he was elected in 1874. During his first two years in the federal parliament his chief speeches were made in defence of Riel and the French halfbreeds who were concerned in the Red River rebellion, and on fiscal questions. Sir John Macdonald, then in opposition, had committed his party to a protectionist policy, and Laurier, notwithstanding that the Liberal party stood for a low tariff, avowed himself to be “a moderate protectionist.” He declared that if he were in Great Britain he would be a free trader, but that free trade or protection must be applied according to the necessities of a country, and that which protection necessarily involved taxation it was the price a young and vigorous nation must pay for its development. But the Liberal government, to which Laurier was admitted as minister of inland revenue in 1877, made only a slight increase in duties, raising the general tariff from 15% to 1712%; and against the political judgment of Alexander Mackenzie, Sir Richard Cartwright, George Brown, Laurier and other of the more influential leaders of the party, it adhered to a low tariff platform. In the bye-election which followed Laurier’s admission to the cabinet he was defeated—the only personal defeat he ever sustained; but a few weeks later he was returned for Quebec East, a constituency which he held thenceforth by enormous majorities. In 1878 his party went out of office and Sir John Macdonald entered upon a long term of power, with protection as the chief feature of his policy, to which was afterwards added the construction of the Canadian Pacific railway.
After the defeat of the Mackenzie government, Laurier sat in Parliament as the leader of the Quebec Liberals and first lieutenant to the Hon. Edward Blake, who succeeded Mackenzie in the leadership of the party. He was associated with Blake in his sustained opposition to high tariff, and to the Conservative plan for the construction of the Canadian Pacific railway, and was a conspicuous figure in the long struggle between Sir John Macdonald and the leaders of the Liberal party to settle the territorial limits of the province of Ontario and the legislative rights of the provinces under the constitution. He was forced also to maintain a long conflict with the ultramontane element of the Roman Catholic church in Quebec, which for many years had a close working alliance with the Conservative politicians of the province and even employed spiritual coercion in order to detach votes from the Liberal party. Notwithstanding that Quebec was almost solidly Roman Catholic the Rouges sternly resisted clerical pressure; they appealed to the courts and had certain elections voided on the ground of undue clerical influence, and at length persuaded the pope to send out a delegate to Canada, through whose inquiry into the circumstances the abuses were checked and the zeal of the ultramontanes restrained.
In 1887, upon the resignation of Blake on the ground of ill-health, Laurier became leader of the Liberal party, although he and many of the more influential men in the party doubted the wisdom of the proceeding. He was the first French Canadian to lead a federal party in Canada since confederation. Apart from the natural fear that he would arouse prejudice in the English-speaking provinces, the second Riel rebellion was then still fresh in the public mind, and the fierce nationalist agitation which Riel’s execution had excited in Quebec had hardly subsided. Laurier could hardly have come to the leadership at a more inopportune moment, and probably he would not have accepted the office at all if he had not believed that Blake could be persuaded to resume the leadership when his health was restored. But from the first he won great popularity even in the English-speaking provinces, and showed unusual capacity for leadership. His party was beaten in the first general election
