He finished his university studies in Santiago, at the Pedagogic Institute and became a teacher of Spanish in 1900. In 1904 he became a lawyer. He married his cousin Juana Rosa Aguirre Luco, with whom he had no children. In 1910, thanks to a government scholarship he studied administrative and financial law at La Sorbonne, plus political economy and social legislation at the College de France. He returned to Chile in 1914 and took a position as a teacher at the Instituto Nacional. He also became president of the National Society of Teachers.