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Cavour

by contessa Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo-Cesaresco · English · Gutenberg #12588 · 380,551 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cavour

Author: contessa Evelyn Lilian Hazeldine Carrington Martinengo-Cesaresco


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #12588]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAVOUR ***

CAVOUR

BY

THE COUNTESS EVELYN MARTINENGO-CESARESCO

1898







_Italia, ab exteris liberanda_.

Motto of Pope JULIUS II.




PREFACE

    'Je suis italien avant tout et c'est pour faire jouir a mon
    pays du _self government_ à l'interieur, come a l'extereur que
    j'ai entrepuis la rude tache de chasser l'Autriche de l'Italie
    sans y substituer la domination d'aucune autre Puissance'--_Cavour
    to the Marquis Emmanuel d'Azeglio (May 8, 1860)_


The day is passed when the warmest admirer of the eminent man whose
character is sketched in the following pages would think it needful
to affirm that he alone regenerated his country. Many forces were
at work; the energising impulse of moral enthusiasm, the spell of
heroism, the ancient and still unextinguished potency of kingly
headship. But Cavour's hand controlled the working of these forces,
and compelled them to coalesce.

The first point in his plan was to make Piedmont a lever by which
Italy could be raised. An Englishman, Lord William Bentinck,
conceived an identical plan in which Sicily stood for Piedmont. He
failed, Cavour succeeded. The second point was to cause the Austrian
power in Italy to receive such a shock that, whether it succumbed at
once or not, it would never recover. In this too, with the help
of Napoleon III, he succeeded. The third point was to prevent the
Continental Powers from forcibly impeding Italian Unity when it became
plain that the population desired to be united. This Cavour succeeded
in doing with the help of England.

Time, which beautifies unlovely things, begins to cast its glamour
over the old Italian _régimes_. It is forgotten how low the Italian
race had fallen under puny autocrats whose influence was soporific
when not vicious. The vigorous if turbulent life of the Middle Ages
was extinct; proof abounded that the _rôle_ of small states was played
out. Goldsmith's description, severe as it is, was not unmerited--

  Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp array'd,
  The pasteboard triumph and the cavalcade;
  Processions formed for piety and love,
  A mistress or a saint in every grove.
  By sports like these are all their cares beguil'd,
  The sports of children satisfy the child;
  Each nobler aim, represt by long control,
  Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul.

Only those who do not know the past can turn away from the present
with scorn or despair. In this century a nation has arisen which, in
spite of all its troubles, is alive with ambition, industry, movement;
which has ten thousand miles of railway, which has conquered the
malaria at Rome, which has doubled its population and halved its
death-rate, which sends out great battle-ships from Venice and Spezia,
Castellamare and Taranto. This nation is Cavour's memorial: _si
monumentum requiris circumspice_.

SALÒ, LAGO DI GARDA.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I
HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT

CHAPTER II
TRAVEL-YEARS

CHAPTER III
THE JOURNALIST

CHAPTER IV
IN PARLIAMENT

CHAPTER V
THE GREAT MINISTRY

CHAPTER VI
THE CRIMEAN WAR--STRUGGLE WITH THE CHURCH

CHAPTER VII
THE CONGRESS OF PARIS

CHAPTER VIII
THE PACT OF PLOMBIÈRES

CHAPTER IX
THE WAR OF 1859--VILLAFRANCA

CHAPTER X
SAVOY AND NICE

CHAPTER XI
THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION

CHAPTER XII
THE KINGDOM OF ITALY

CHAPTER XIII
ROME VOTED THE CAPITAL--CONCLUSION

CHIEF AUTHORITIES




CHAPTER I

HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT


Nothing is permanent but change; only it ought to be remembered that
change itself is of the nature of an evolution, not of a catastrophe.
Commonly this is not remembered, and we seem to go forward by bounds
and leaps, or it may be to go backward; in either case the thread of
continuity is lost. We appear to have moved far away from the men
of forty years ago, except in the instances in which these men have
survived to remind us of themselves. It is rather startling to
recollect that Cavour might have been among the survivors. He was born
on August 10, 1810. The present Pope, Leo the Thirteenth, was born in
the same year.

It was a moment of lull, after the erection and before the collapse
of the Napoleonic edifice in Italy. If no thinking mind believed that
edifice to be eternal, if every day did not add to its solidity but
took something silently from it, nevertheless it had the outwardly
imposing appearance which obtains for a political _régime_ the
acceptance of the apathetic and lukewarm to supplement the support of
partisans. Above all, it was a phase in national existence which made
any real return to the phase that preceded it impossible. The
air teemed with new germs; they entered even into the mysterious
composition of the brain of the generation born in the first decade of
the nineteenth century.

Environment and heredity do not explain all the puzzle of any single
man's mind and character, but they form co-efficients in the making of
him which can be no longer disregarded. The chief point to be noticed
in reference to Cavour is that he was the outcome of a mingling of
race which was not only transmitted through the blood, but also was a
living presence during his childhood and youth. His father's stock,
the Bensos of Cavour, belonged to the old Piedmontese nobility.
A legend declares that a Saxon pilgrim, a follower of Frederick
Barbarossa, stopped, when returning from the Holy Land, in the little
republic of Chieri, where he met and married the heiress to all the
Bensos, whose name he assumed. Cavour used to laugh at the story, but
the cockle shells in the arms of the Bensos and their German motto,
"Gott will recht," seem to connect the family with those transalpine
crusading adventurers who brought the rising sap of a new nation
to reinvigorate the peoples they tarried amongst. Chieri formed a
diminutive free community known as "the republic of the seven B's,"
from the houses of Benso, Balbo, Balbiani, Biscaretti, Buschetti,
Bertone, and Broglie, which took their origin from it, six of which
became notable in their own country and one in France. The Bensos
acquired possession of the fief of Santena and of the old fastness of
Cavour in the province of Pignerolo. This castle has remained a ruin
since it was destroyed by Catinat, but in the last century Charles
Emmanuel III. conferred the title of Marquis of Cavour on a Benso who
had rendered distinguished military services. At the time of Cavour's
birth the palace of the Bensos at Turin contained a complete
and varied society composed of all sorts of nationalities and
temperaments. Such different elements could hardly have dwelt together
in harmony if the head of the household, Cavour's grandmother, had not
been a superior woman in every sense, and one endowed with the worldly
tact and elastic spirits without which even superior gifts are of
little worth in the delicate, intimate relations of life. Nurtured in
a romantic _château_ on the lake of Annecy, Philippine, daughter of
the Marquis de Sales, was affianced by her father at an early age
to the eldest son of the Marquis Benso di Cavour, knight of the
Annunziata, whom she never saw till the day of their marriage. At once
she took her place in her new family not only as the ideal _grande
dame_, but as the person to whom every one went in trouble and
perplexity. That was a moment which developed strong characters and
effaced weak ones. The revolutionary ocean was fatally rolling towards
the Alps. It found what had been so long the "buffer state" asleep.
There was a king who, unlike the princes of his race, was more amiable
than vigorous. Arthur Young, the traveller, reports that Victor
Emmanuel I. went about with his pocket full of bank notes, and was
discontented at night if he had not given them all away. "Yet this,"
adds the observant Englishman, "with an empty treasury and an
incomplete, ill-paid army." It was a bad preparation for the deluge,
but when that arrived, inevitable though unforeseen, desperate if
futile efforts were made to stem it. Some of the Piedmontese nobility
were very rich, but it was a wealth of increment, not of capital.
The burdens imposed when too late by the Sardinian Government, and
afterwards the cost of the French occupation, severely strained the
resources even of the wealthiest. The Marquise Philippine sold the
family plate and the splendid hangings of silk brocade which adorned
the walls of the Palazzo Cavour at Turin. Napoleon from the first
looked upon Italy as the bank of the French army. This idea had been
impressed upon him before he started for the campaign which was to
prove the corner-stone of his career. "He was instructed," writes the
secret agent Landrieux, "as to what might well be drawn from this war
for the French treasury."

After the pillage and the war contributions came the blood-tax. The
Marquise Philippine's son, sixteen years old, was ordered to join
General Berthier's corps, and to provide him with £10 pocket money
she sold what till then she had religiously kept, a silver holy water
stoup, which belonged to her saintly ancestor, François de Sales.

The last sacrifices, imposed not in the name of the country, but to
the advantage of an insatiable invader, were not likely to inspire the
old nobility of Piedmont with much love for the new order of things,
nor was love the feeling with which the Marquise regarded it, but she
had the insight to see what few of her class perceived, that the hour
of day cannot be turned back; the future could not be as the past had
been. When Prince Camillo Borghese was appointed governor of Piedmont
(on account of his being the husband of Napoleon's sister, the
beautiful Pauline Bonaparte, who was the original of Canova's Venus),
the Marquise Philippine was commanded to accept the post of _dame
d'honneur_ to the Princess. A refusal would have meant the ruin of
both the Cavours and her own kin, the De Sales, whose estates in Savoy
were already confiscated. She bowed to necessity, and in a position
which could not have been one of the easiest, she knew how to preserve
her own dignity, and to win the friendship of the far from demure
Pauline, whom she accompanied to Paris for the celebration of the
marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise. It is characteristic of the
epoch that in the French capital the Marquise took lessons in the art
of teaching from a French pedagogue then in repute, to qualify her to
begin the education of her little grandchildren, Gustave and Camille.

These two boys were the sons of the Marquis Michele Benso; who had
married a daughter of the Count de Sellon of Geneva. While on a tour
in Switzerland to recover his health from a wound received in the
French service, the Marquis met the Count and his three daughters, of
whom he wished to make the eldest, Victoire, his wife; but on his suit
not prospering with her, he proposed to and was accepted by the second
daughter, Adele. After an unfortunate first marriage, Victoire became
the Duchess de Clermont Tonnerre, and the youngest sister, Henriette,
married a Count d'Auzers of Auvergne. All these relatives ended by
taking up their abode in the Palazzo Cavour at Turin. Victoire was the
cleverest, but her sisters as well as herself were what even in these
days would be considered highly educated. She became a Roman Catholic,
a step followed by Adele after the birth of her second child, Camille,
but Henriette remained true to the rigid Protestantism of Geneva. At
the christening of Camille de Cavour the Prince and Princess Borghese
officiated as sponsors, the Marquis Benso holding at that time a post
in the Prince's household which he owed to the good graces enjoyed by
his mother.

It is plain that of all his kindred, the charming and valiant Marquise
Philippine was the one whom Camille de Cavour most fondly loved. She
was the member of his family who understood him best not only in
childhood, but in manhood, and when all the others reproached him with
embracing ideas contrary to his traditions and his order, he turned
for comfort to his "dearest Marina," as he called her ("Marina" being
the pet-name by which children in Piedmont called their grandmothers),
and begged her to defend him against the charge of undutiful conduct.
It might be true, he said, with the irony which was one day to become
so familiar, that he was that dreadful thing, a liberal, but devoid
of natural feeling he was not. On the great day when the Statute was
granted, he said to the light-hearted old lady, "Marina, we get on
capitally, you and I; you were always a little bit of a Jacobin." That
was not long before her strength, though not her courage, gave way
under the deep sorrow of the loss of her great-grandson Auguste on the
field of Goito. She died in the midst of the political transformation
she had so long waited for.

As a child Cavour was normally sweet-tempered, but subject to violent
fits of passion; while he hated his lessons, he showed an early
development of intelligence and judgment. Like most precocious
children he had one or two infantile love affairs. A letter exists
written when he was six, in which he upbraids a little girl named
Fanchonette for basely abandoning him. He says that he loves her
still, _but_ he has now made the acquaintance of a young lady of
extraordinary charms, who has twice taken him out in the most
beautiful gilt carriage. It is amusing to note the worldly wisdom of
the suitor of six who reckons on jealousy to bring back the allegiance
of the fair but faithless Fanchonette. The magnificent rival was
Silvio Pellico's friend, the Marchioness de Barolo, who, like every
one else, was attracted by the clever child with his blue eyes and
little round face. Another story belonging to the same date is even
more characteristic. The Cavours went every year to Switzerland to
stay with their connections, the De Sellons and the De la Rives. On
this occasion, when the travellers reached M. de la Rive's villa at
Présinge, Camille, looking terribly in earnest, and with an air of
importance, made the more comical by the little red costume he was
wearing, went straight to his host with the announcement that the
postmaster had treated them abominably by giving them the worst
horses, and that he ought to be dismissed. "But," said M. de la Rive,
"I cannot dismiss him; that depends on the syndic." "Very well," said
the child, "I wish for an audience with the syndic." "You shall have
one to-morrow," replied M. de la Rive, who wrote to the syndic, a
friend of his, that he was going to send him a highly entertaining
little man. Camille was therefore received next day with all possible
ceremony, which by no means abashed him. After making three bows, he
quietly and lucidly explained his grievance, and apparently got a
promise of satisfaction, as when he went back he exclaimed in triumph
to M. de la Rive, "He will be dismissed!"

The Swiss relations were most enlightened people. Cavour's uncle,
the Count de Sellon, was a sort of Swiss Wilberforce, an ardent
philanthropist whose faith in human perfectibility used sometimes to
make his nephew smile, but early intercourse with a man of such large
and generous views could not have been without effect. De Sellon
was one of the first persons to dream of arbitration, and though a
Protestant he sent a memorial on this subject to the Pope. M. de la
Rive was a man of great scientific acquirements, and his son William
became Cavour's congenial and life-long friend. This cosmopolitan
society was entirely unlike the narrow coteries of the ancient
Piedmontese aristocracy which are so graphically described by Massimo
d'Azeglio, and the absence of constraint in which Cavour grew up makes
a striking contrast to the iron paternal rule under which the young
d'Azeglios trembled. It should be observed, however, that in spite of
his mixed blood and scattered ties, Cavour was in feeling from the
first the member of one race and the citizen of one state. The
stronger influence, that of the father's strain, predominated to the
exclusion of all others. Though all classes in Piedmont till within
the last fifty years spoke French when they did not speak dialect,
the intellectual sway of France was probably nowhere in Italy felt so
little as in Piedmont. The proximity of the two countries tended not
for it, but against it. They had been often at war; all the memories
of the Piedmontese people, the heroic exploit of Pietro Micca, the
royal legend of the Superga, turned on resistance to the powerful
neighbour. A long line of territorial nobles like the Bensos
transmits, if nothing else, at least a strong sentiment for the
birthland. In Cavour this sentiment was, indeed, to widen even in
boyhood, but it widened into Italian patriotism, not into sterile
cosmopolitanism.

In one respect Cavour was brought up according to the strictest of
old Piedmontese conventions. No one forgot that he was a younger
son. Gustave, the elder brother, received a classical education, and
acquired a strong taste for metaphysics. He became a thinker rather
than a man of action, and was one of the first and staunchest friends
of the philosopher-theologian Rosmini, whose attempts to reconcile
religion and philosophy led him into a bitter struggle with Rome. For
Camille another sort of life was planned. It was decided that he must
"do something," and at the age of ten he was sent to the Military
Academy at Turin. He did not like it, but it was better for him than
if he had been kept at home. Mathematics were well taught at the
Academy, and in this branch he soon outstripped all his schoolfellows.
He himself always spoke of his mathematical studies as having been of
great service in forming the habit of precise thought; from the study
of triangles, he said, he went on to the study of men and things. On
the other hand the boys were taught little Latin and less Greek, and
nothing was done to furnish them with the basis of a literary style, a
fact always deplored by Cavour, who insisted that the art of writing
ought to be acquired when young; otherwise it could not be practised
without labour, and never with entire success. He once said that
he found it easier to make Italy than a sonnet. In his own case he
regretted never having become a ready writer, because he knew that the
pen is a force; he held that a man should cultivate every means at his
disposal to increase his power.

In 1824, when Charles Albert returned to Piedmont after three years'
exile in consequence of the part he was suspected of having taken in
the abortive revolution of 1821, one of his first acts was to obtain a
nomination for young Cavour as page in the royal household. The pages
were all inmates of the Military Academy, where the expense of their
education was borne by the king after they received the appointment.
The Count d'Auzers, a strong Legitimist, was one of the oldest friends
of the Prince of Carignano, who was regarded at the Palazzo Cavour as
the victim of false accusations of liberalism. Charles Albert always
seemed to reflect the opinions of the person to whom he was writing
or speaking. Thus it is certain that in his letters to the Count he
appeared as a convinced upholder of white flags. Cavour must have
heard him often defended from the charge of patriotism. Perhaps this
created in his mind a first aversion, which was strengthened by
personal contact in the course of his duties at Court. At any rate it
is clear that he never liked or trusted him.

When Cavour left the Military Academy in 1826 he came out first in the
final examinations. He entered the army with the rank of lieutenant in
the Corps of Engineers. He began to learn English. In a letter written
at this time he speaks of the utility of modern languages and a real
knowledge of history, but adds that a man who wishes to make a name
should concentrate his faculties rather than disperse them among
too many subjects and pursuits. Even then he had an almost definite
project of preparing himself to play a part in life. There is not much
to show what were his political ideas, except a memorandum written
when he was eighteen on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, in which
he adopted the views of Santorre di Santa Rosa, once Charles Albert's
friend and later his severest critic, to combat whose indictment the
Count d'Auzers had written folios in the French and German newspapers.
At the end of the memorandum Cavour transcribed an extract from Santa
Rosa's work, in which he invoked the advent of an Italian Washington.
Was that the part which Cavour dreamed of playing? A few years after,
he wrote in a fit of despondency, "There was a time when I should have
thought it the most natural thing in the world that I should wake up
one morning prime minister of a kingdom of Italy." The words written
in 1832 throw a flood of light on the subjects of his boyish dreams
and the goal of his prophetic ambition.

The story repeated by most of Cavour's biographers, that in putting
off the page's uniform he uttered some scornful words which, reported
to Charles Albert, changed the goodwill of that prince into hostility,
rests on doubtful authority; but it seems to be true that Charles
Albert, who began by being very well disposed to the son and nephew
of his friends, calling him in one letter "the interesting youth who
justifies such great hopes," and in another, "ce charmant Camille,"
came to consider his quondam _protégé_ a restless spirit, inconvenient
in the present and possibly dangerous in the future. Though the
schoolboy essay above mentioned was kept a secret, the liberal
heresies of the young lieutenant were well enough known. He was told
that he would bring father and mother in sorrow to the grave, and he
was even threatened with banishment to America. The police watched
his movements. He wrote to his Swiss uncle that he had no right to
complain as he was liberal and very liberal and desired a complete
change in the whole system. On Charles Albert's accession to the
throne he was sent to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard; but
it appears that not the king (as he supposed) but his own father
suggested the step. Cavour saw in the idleness and apathy of garrison
life in this lonely place a type of the disease from which the whole
State was suffering. He wrote to the Count de Sellon, the apostle of
universal peace, that much as he abhorred bloodshed, he could think of
no cure but war. "The Italians need regeneration; their _moral_, which
was completely corrupted under the ignoble dominion of Spaniards and
Austrians, regained a little energy under the French _régime_, and
the ardent youth of the country sighs for a nationality; but to break
entirely with the past, to be born anew to a better state, great
efforts are necessary and sacrifices of all kinds must remould the
Italian character. An Italian war would be a sure pledge that we were
going to become again a nation, that we were rising from the mud in
which we have been trampled for so many centuries."

These lines, written by a young officer of twenty-one, show how far
Cavour had already outstripped the Piedmontese provincialism which
had the upper hand in the early years of Charles Albert's reign. He
described himself as vegetating, but he was not idle; sustained mental
activity was, in fact, a necessity to him whatever were his outward
circumstances. He read Bentham and Adam Smith, and was excited by the
events going on in England, then in the throes of the first Reform
Bill. It was in the fortress of Bard that he gained a grasp of English
politics which he never lost, and which hardly another foreigner ever
possessed in a like degree. By chance he became acquainted with an
English artist who was engaged in making drawings of the Alpine
passes. This gave him not only the opportunity of speaking and writing
English, but also of expressing his private thoughts without reserve,
which was impossible with his fellow-countrymen. Throughout his
life he found the same mental relaxation in his intercourse with
Englishmen; he felt safe with them.

Cavour was not meant to be a soldier; his tastes did not agree with
the routine of military life, and his clear judgment told him that the
army is not the natural or correct sphere for a politician--which he
knew himself to be even then, in a country where politics may be said
not to have existed. Acting on these reflections, he resigned his
commission, and his father, perhaps to keep him quiet, bought him a
small independent property near the ancestral estate at Leri. The
Marquis warned his son that the income would not allow him to keep a
valet or a horse; his mother opposed the purchase, as she thought that
the young landlord would be tempted to spend more than he had, but to
this his father replied that if a man was not a man at twenty-five he
would be one never. The Marquis Michele Benso had recently assumed
the post of _Vicario_ of Turin, which his family thought below his
dignity, but he apparently took it to oblige the king, with whom the
_Vicario_, who was a sort of Prefect of Police, was in daily contact.
As a result, the estate of Leri, which had been neglected before, was
now going actually to ruin. Cavour, with the approval of his brother,
proposed to undertake the whole management of the property, an offer
gladly accepted, as the Marquis was well convinced that his younger
son had rather too many than too few abilities. Cavour saw in
agriculture the only field at present open to him. When he left the
army he scarcely knew a cabbage from a turnip, for he had not been
brought up in the country, but in a few years he familiarised himself
with everything connected with the subject, from the most homely
detail to wide scientific generalisations. With knowledge came
interest, which, absent at first, grew strong, and lasted all his
life. Little, he said, does the outsider know the charm of planting a
field of potatoes or rearing a young heifer! The practical experience
which Cavour gained was precious. How many cabinet ministers in
different parts of the world would lead to bankruptcy a farm, a
factory, a warehouse, even a penny tart shop! As a matter of fact,
one Italian minister of finance was legally interdicted, on the
application of his family, from managing his own estates.

Leri, which Cavour looked upon henceforth as his true home, lies in
one of the ugliest parts of the plains of Piedmont, cold in winter,
scorched by a burning sun in summer, and unhealthy from the
exhalations of the rice-fields which contribute to its wealth. Except
that game was tolerably plentiful, it had none of the attractions of
an English country-seat--the smiling hillside, the ancestral elms, the
park, the garden. Cavour led the simplest life; the old housekeeper
who cooked the dinner also placed it on the table. But the fare, if
plain, was abundant, and Cavour was delighted to entertain his friends
and neighbours, who found him the most affable of hosts, inexhaustibly
good-tempered, a patient listener, a talker abounding in wit and
wisdom. He had the art of adapting himself perfectly to the society in
which he moved, but in one thing he was always the same: wherever he
went he carried his intense vitality--that quality of _entrain_ which
persuades more than eloquence or earnestness. He induced others to
join him in experiments which were then innovations: steam-mills,
factories for artificial manures and the like, while the machinery and
new methods introduced at Leri revolutionised farming in Piedmont. One
great scheme planned by him, an irrigatory canal between the Ticino
and the Po, was only finished after his death, as the most worthy
tribute to his memory. He rose at four, went to see his cattle, stood
in the broiling harvest fields to overlook the reapers, acted, in
short, as his own bailiff, and to these habits he returned in later
years, whenever he had time to visit Leri. Cavour's mind was not
poetic; we hear of his admiring only one poet, Shakespeare, but in
Shakespeare it was probably the deep knowledge of man that attracted
him, the apprehension of how men with given passions must act under
given conditions. He did not, therefore, see country pursuits from a
poet's standpoint, but he appreciated their power of calming men's
minds, of dissipating the fog of unrealities, of tending towards what
Kant called, in a phrase he quoted with approval, "practical reason."
He considered, also, that nothing can so assure the stability of a
nation as an intelligent interest shared by a large portion of its
citizens in the cultivation of the soil. The English country gentleman
who divided his time between his duties in Parliament and those not
less obligatory on his estates was in Cavour's eyes an almost ideal
personage. It should be added that Cavour could not understand a
country life which did not embrace solicitude for the worker. The true
agriculturist gained the confidence of the poor around him; it was, he
said, so easy to gain it. He was kindly, thoughtful, and just in his
treatment of his dependents, and he always retained his hold on their
affections; when Italy was asking what she should do without her great
statesman, the sorrowing peasants of Leri asked in tears what they
should do without their master?

One passage in Cavour's early life was revealed a few years ago, and,
whether or not it was right to reveal it, the portrait would be now
incomplete which did not touch upon it. The episode belongs to the
critical psychological moment in his development: the time immediately
after he left the army, and before he found an outlet for his
activity, and, what was more essential to him, a purpose and an object
not in the distance but straight before him, in the care of his
father's acres. His position at home was not happy; his brother's
small children were of more importance in the household than himself,
and when Cavour once administered a well-merited correction to the
much-spoilt eldest born, the Marquis Gustave threw a chair at his
head. Between the brothers in after life there prevailed remarkable
and unbroken harmony, but it is easy to see that when first grown to
manhood Gustave presumed rather selfishly on his _rôle_ of heir,
while Camille took too seriously the supposed discovery that he was
"necessary to no one!" Beyond all this, there was the undeclared clash
of the new with the old, the feeling of having moved apart, which
produces a moral vacuum until, by and by, it is realised that the
value of the first affections and ties depends precisely on their
resting on no basis of opinion. Cavour was overwhelmed by a sense of
isolation; if he decided "like Hamlet" (so he writes in his diary) to
abstain from suicide, he believed that he wished himself heartily out
of the world. To his family he seemed an abnormal and unnatural young
man. A conversation is on record which took place between the two
childless aunts who lived with the Cavours. The date was just before
Cavour's departure on a first visit to Paris. "Did you remark," said
Mme. Victoire, "how indifferent Camille seemed when I spoke to him of
the Paris theatres? I really do not know what will interest him on his
travels; the poor boy is entirely absorbed in revolutions." "It is
quite true," replied Mme. Henriette; "Camille has no curiosity about
things, he cares for nothing but politics." And the two ladies went on
to draw melancholy prognostics from their nephew's study of political
economy, "an erroneous and absolutely useless science."

A charming countess who had made a favourite of Cavour in his boyhood
tried to extract a promise from him that he would never again mix
himself up in politics; he refused to give it; sooner or later, he
writes in his diary, she would have blushed for him had he consented.
But, he adds bitterly, what was the good of demanding such a promise
from one for whom politically everything was ended? "Ah! if I were an
Englishman, by this time I should be something and my name would not
be wholly unknown!" Here, again, was a source of depression. At the
Military Academy he had formed one almost romantic comradeship with
a delicate and reserved youth, some years older than himself, Baron
Severino Cassio, to whom he first confided his determination to
Italianise himself: to study the language, history, laws, customs of
the whole country with a view to preparing for the future. Cassio
presciently marked out for his friend the part of architect, not of
destroyer, in that future; architects, he said, were what was most
wanted in public affairs, and Italy had always lacked them. There is
no reason to think that Cassio's sympathy had chilled, but Cavour, in
his morbid state, thought that it was so; he imagined that what
had drawn Cassio to him "was not I, but my powerful intellectual
organisation"; and with undeserved mistrust he did not turn to him for
comfort.

He was at the nadir of his dejection when he received a letter in a
well-known handwriting, that of a woman who had strongly attracted
him four years before by her beauty, grace, and elevation of mind.
Separation cut short the incipient love-affair, and Cavour never
thought of renewing it. With the woman it was otherwise; from her
first meeting with the youth of twenty to the day of her death,
absent or present, he was the object of an idolatry in which all
her faculties united: her being was penetrated by a self-sustaining
passion which could not cease till it had consumed her. De Stendhal is
the only novelist who could have drawn such a character. She was of
noble birth, and from an early age had been eminently unhappy. Cavour,
in his private papers, called her "L'Inconnue," and so she will be
remembered. Her own life-story, and whether she was free to give her
heart where she would, the world does not and need not know; on the
last point it is enough to say that Cavour's father and mother were
aware of his relations with her and saw in them nothing reprehensible.

On a page meant for no eyes but his own, Cavour describes the
excitement into which he was thrown by the brief letter which
announced that the Unknown had arrived at Turin and that she wished
to see him. He hastened back to town and sought her at her hotel, and
then at the opera where she had gone. After looking all round the
house, he recognised her in a box--the sixth to the left on the first
row--dressed in deep mourning and showing on her face such evident
marks of suffering that he was at once filled with remorse "and
intoxicated by a love so pure, so constant, and so disinterested."
Never would he forsake this divine woman again!

For a moment he thought of flight to distant shores, but he soon
decided that "imperative duties required that she should remain where
she was." Their intercourse chiefly consisted of letters; his do not
seem to exist, hers were found after his death carefully preserved and
numbered. In these letters she laid bare her innermost soul; she was
ardently patriotic, steeped in the ideas of Mazzini, and far more
Italian than Piedmontese, though she wrote in French. She knew
English, and Cavour advised her to read Shakespeare. Remarkably
gifted, she had the deep humility of many of the best Italian women;
"What have I done, O Camille," she asks, "to meet a soul like
yours!... To have known you for an instant fills a long existence; how
can you love me, weak as I am?" She had an astonishing instinct of his
future greatness: "Full of force, life, talent, called, perhaps to
make a brilliant career, to contribute to the general good," such
expressions as these occur frequently in her letters. The romance
ended as it could not help ending. The "eternal vows" were kept for a
year and a few months; then on Cavour's side a love which, though he
did not guess it, had only been a reflection, faded into compassionate
interest. The _Inconnue_ uttered no reproaches; after a few unhappy
years she died, leaving a last letter to her inconstant lover. "The
woman who loved you is dead ... no one ever loved you as she did, no
one! For, O Camille, you never fathomed the extent of her love." With
a broken-hearted pride she declared that "in the domain of death she
surpassed all rivals." It remained true; if Cavour was not, strictly
speaking, more faithful to the _Inconnue's_ memory than he had been to
her while she lived, yet this was the only real love-passage in his
life. Fatal to her, it was fortunate to him. It found him in despair
and it left him self-reliant and matured. The love of such a woman was
a liberal education.




CHAPTER II

TRAVEL-YEARS


During the fifteen years which he devoted to agriculture, Cavour made
several long and important visits to France and England. In this way
he enlarged his experience, while keeping aloof from the governing
class in his own country, connection with which could, in his opinion,
only bring loss of reputation and effacement in the better days that
were to come. Cavour knew himself to be ambitious, but he had the
self-control never even to contemplate the purchase of what then
passed for power by the sacrifice of his principles. "My principles,"
he once wrote, "are a part of myself." The best way "to prepare for
the honourable offices of the future" was to keep his independence
intact, and to study abroad the working of the institutions which he
wished to see introduced at home. Through his French relations, he
took his place immediately in the best society of the capital of the
citizen king, under whose reign, sordid as it was in some respects,
Paris attained an intellectual brilliancy the like of which was never
equalled in the spectacular glare of the second empire. It was the
moment of a short-lived renaissance; literature, art, science, seemed
to be starting on new voyages of discovery. New worlds were opened up
for conquest; oriental studies for the first time became popular, the
great field of unwritten traditions surrendered its virgin soil. Above
all, it was a time of fermentation in moral ideas; every one expected
the millennium, though there was a lack of agreement as to what it
would consist in. Every one, like Lamennais in Béranger's poem, was
going "to save the world." The Good, the True, the Beautiful, were
about to dislodge the Bad, the False, the Ugly. If all these high
hopes had some fruition in the region of thought, they had none in the
region of facts, but meanwhile they lent a rare charm to Paris in the
Thirties. Cavour speaks of elasticity as the ruling quality of French
society; he praises the admirable union of science and wit, depth and
amiability, substance and form, to be found in certain Parisian salons
and nowhere else. He was thinking especially of the salon of Mme. de
Circourt, who became his friend through life. For no one else had he
quite the same unchanging regard. Attracted as he always was by the
conquest of difficulties, he admired the force of mind and will by
which this Russian lady, whom a terrible accident had made a hopeless
invalid, overcame disabilities that would have reduced most people to
a state of living death. In her, spirit annihilated matter. She joined
French vivacity to the penetrating sensibility of the Sclavonic races,
and she was a keen reader of character. Cavour interested her at once.
Even in his exterior, the young Italian, with blond hair and blue
eyes, was then more attractive than those who only knew the Cavour of
later years could easily believe; while his gay and winning manners,
combined with a fund of information on subjects not usually popular
with the young, could not but strike so discerning a judge as the
Countess de Circourt as indicating not a common personality. She
feared lest so much talent and promise would be suffocated for ever in
the stifling air of a small despotism. Cavour himself drew a miserable
picture of his country: science and intelligence were reputed
"infernal things by those who are obliging enough to govern us"; a
triumphant bigotry trembled alike at railways and Rosmini; Cavour's
aunt, the Duchess de Clermont Tonnerre, only got permission to receive
the _Journal des Débats_ after long negotiations between the French
minister at Turin and the Sardinian government. No wonder if Mme. de
Circourt impulsively entreated the young man to shake the dust of
Piedmont off his feet and to seek a career in France. In his answer
to this proposition, he asks first of all, what have his parents done
that he should plunge a knife into their hearts? Sacred duties bound
him to them, and he would never quit them till they were separated by
the grave. This filial piety stands the more to Cavour's credit, as
his home life had not been very happy. He went on to inquire, what
real inducement was there for him to abandon his native land? A
literary reputation? Was he to run after a little celebrity, a little
glory, without ever reaching the real goal of his ambition? What
influence could he exercise in favour of his unhappy brothers in a
country where egotism monopolised the high places? What was the mass
of foreigners doing which had been thrown into Paris by choice or
misfortune? Who among them was useful to his fellow-men? The political
troubles which desolated Italy had obliged her noblest sons to fly far
from her, but in their exile their eminent faculties became forceless
and sterile. Only one Italian had made a name in Paris, Pellegrino
Rossi; but this man, whose capacities Cavour rated as extraordinary,
reached the summit of success open to him in France when he obtained a
professorship at the Sorbonne and a chair in the Academy, whereas,
in the country which he repudiated, he might have one day guided his
compatriots in the paths of the new civilisation--words which read
like an imperfect prophecy, since the unfortunate Rossi was to lose
his life later in the attempt to reform the papal government. Cavour
repeats that literature would be the only promising opening, and for
literature he feels no vocation; he has a reasoning, not an inventive
head; he does not possess a grain of imagination; in his whole life he
had never been able to construct even the smallest story to amuse a
child; at best he would be a third-class literary man, and he says
in the matter of art he can only conceive one position: the highest.
Certainly he might turn to science; to become a great mathematician,
chemist, physicist, was a way of seeking glory as good as another;
only he confessed that it had few attractions "for the Italian with
the rosy complexion and the smile of a child." Ethical science
interested him more, but this was to be pursued in retirement, not in
great cities. "No, no," he writes, "it is not in flying from one's
fatherland because it is unhappy that one can attain a glorious end."
But if he were mistaken, if a splendid future awaited him on foreign
soil, still his resolution would be the same. Evil be to him who
denies his fellow-countrymen as unworthy of him. "Happy or unhappy, my
country shall have all my life; I will never be unfaithful to her even
were I sure of finding elsewhere a brilliant destiny."

While Cavour was in Paris, Tocqueville's _Democracy in America_ was
published, and immediately gave its author European fame. It did not
probably exercise much influence over Cavour in the formation of
opinions, but he found his own confirmed in it both as to the tendency
of modern societies towards democracy for better or worse, and also as
to the independence of the Church from State control, in which, from
the time that he began to think at all on such matters, he had thought
to see the solution of all difficulties of a politico-religious
sort. Cavour changed his practice, but rarely his mind; most of the
conclusions of the statesman had been reached at twenty-five. It was
not easy for him to take those who fundamentally differed from him
entirely seriously. Once, when he was the guest of the Princess
Belgiojoso, Musset's irresponsive idol and Heine's good angel, the
fair hostess bestowed on him such a republican lecture that he wrote,
"They will not catch me there again"; but he went. At the Duchess
d'Abrantés' receptions he met "the relics of all the governments."
He only spoke on one occasion to Guizot. The minister seems to have
received him coldly. He remarked that with these great people you
must be a person of importance to make any way; an obscure citizen of
Piedmont, unknown beyond the commune of which he was syndic, could
have no chance. With Thiers he got on much better; principles apart,
their temperaments were not inharmonious. Of the literary men Cavour
preferred Sainte Beuve; in Cousin he cared less for the philosopher
than for the friend of Santorre di Santa Rosa, the exiled patriot of
1821. Cousin introduced him to several fervid Italian liberals, among
others Berchet, the poet. He was invited by Alessandro Bixio to meet
the author of _Monte Cristo_. Bixio was one day to be intimately mixed
up in Franco-Italian politics, in which he acted as intermediary
between Cavour and Prince Napoleon. Royer Collard, Jules Simon,
Michelet, Ozanum, Quinet, and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz were
then giving lectures, which Cavour found time to attend. The great
Rachel filled the stage. Cavour, who in his later years never went to
a theatre except when he wanted to go to sleep, was a warm admirer
of the incomparable actress, who satisfied his requirement of the
absolutely first class in art. He was drawn to the highest genius as
much as he was repelled by mediocrity. He blamed Rachel, however, for
the choice of one particularly repulsive _rôle_, and suspected that
she chose it because the dress suited her to perfection.

It was always known that Cavour staked considerable sums at cards,
but that he had at one time a real passion for gambling was hardly
supposed till the self-accusations of his journal were laid bare.
Though there was little in him of the Calvinism of his maternal
ancestors, he judged himself on this point with the severity of an
austere moralist. In the world of pleasure in which he moved such
offences were considered venial, but he looked upon them with the
disgust of a man who reckons personal freedom beyond all earthly
goods, and who sees himself in danger of becoming a slave. "The
humiliating and degrading emotions of play" threaten, he says, to
undermine his intellectual and moral faculties; his "miserable
weakness" degrades him in his own eyes; conscience, reason,
self-respect, interest, call upon him to fight against it and destroy
it. From high play at cards to gambling on the Bourse there is but a
step. Cavour embarked in a speculation the success of which depended
on the outbreak of war in the East, which he believed to be imminent.
No war occurred, and the loss of a few hundred pounds obliged him to
apply to his father for supplies. The Marquis sent the money, and
wrote good-naturedly that the mishap might teach Camille to moderate
his belief in his own infallibility. He thought himself the only young
man in the world in whom there was a ready-made minister, banker,
manufacturer, and speculator; and if he did not take care the idea
that he could never be wrong might prevent him from turning to account
the superior gifts with which he was undoubtedly endowed. But the
kindliness of the reproof did not lessen his own sense of shame and
mortification. The lesson was useful; he forsook the Bourse, and at
cards he conquered the passion without giving up the game. Rightly or
wrongly it was said that many years after he played high stakes at
whist with political men to gain an insight into their characters.
In any case there is nothing to show that his fondness for play ever
again led him into excesses which his judgment condemned. He had
recovered his freedom.

Cavour invariably ended his visits to Paris by crossing the Channel,
and, if in the French capital he gained greater knowledge of men, it
was in England that he first grew familiar with the public life which
he considered a pattern for the world. He did not find the delightful
social intercourse to be enjoyed in Paris; in fact, not one of the
persons to whom he brought letters of introduction took the least
notice of him. English society is quicker to run after celebrities
than to discern them in embryo. But the two or three Englishmen whom
he already knew were active in his behalf. William Brokedon, his
old friend the painter, conducted him to the dinner of the Royal
Geographical Society, where a curious thing happened. Cavour's first
essay in public speaking was before an English assembly. After several
toasts had been duly honoured, the Secretary of the Society, to his
unbounded astonishment, proposed his health. Taken unawares, he
expressed his thanks in a few words, which were well received, and on
sitting down he said to his neighbour, the Earl of Ripon, "C'est mon
_maiden speech_!" Lord Ripon remarked, "with a significant smile,"
that he hoped it would be the opening of a long career. He dined with
John Murray, and went to see Faraday, who in his working clothes made
him think of a philosopher of the sixteenth century. At a party given
by Babbage, the mathematician, he met Hallam, Tocqueville, Ada Byron,
and the three beautiful daughters of Sheridan. With Nassau Senior he
began a long friendship, and Edward Romilly, the librarian of Trinity
College, Cambridge, whom he had met at Geneva, introduced him to a
rich landed proprietor of the name of Davenport, who was to prove the
most useful of all his English acquaintances, as he liberally placed
his house in Cheshire at Cavour's disposal to give him an opportunity
of studying English agriculture. The chance was not thrown away.
Cavour learnt everything about the management of a well-ordered
English estate down to the minutest particulars. He admired much,
especially the system of subsoil drainage, then a novelty to
foreigners, but he was not carried away by the beautiful appearance of
the English country so far as to think that the English farmer was in
all respects ahead of the North Italian. He compared the up-and-down
English meadow left to itself with the highly-manured pasture lands of
Piedmont, level as billiard-boards, which yield their three crops of
hay a year. One point Cavour was never tired of impressing on students
of agriculture; it was this, and it exactly shows his habit of mind:
never consider results without knowing what they cost. Correct the
selling price by the cost of production. He had no patience with model
farms; they might be magnificent, but they were not agriculture. In
one of his earliest writings he held them up to ridicule.

In England he studied the then new Poor Laws; even before he started
on his first travels, he decided to inquire into the position of the
poorest classes in the countries he visited. He recognised that the
acknowledgment of the prescriptive right of every member of the
community to food and shelter was the first step to vast changes in
social legislation. Cavour's natural inclinations were more those of
a social and economic reformer than of the political innovator.
Gasworks, factories, hospitals, and prisons were in turn inspected.
Cavour went thoroughly into the questions of prison labour and diet.
He did not object to the treadmill in itself, but thought unfruitful
labour demoralising. Useful work with a small gain reformed the
convict. The prison fare seemed to him rather too good. He was
impressed by the bread "as good as the best that is consumed in the
clubs." Probably, next to the policeman, what impresses the thinking
foreigner most in the British Isles is the Englishman's loaf of white
bread. It might appear that in his close study of utilitarian England,
Cavour missed the greater England of imagination and adventure, of
genius and energy. It is true that he did homage at the shrine of
Shakespeare by a visit to Stratford-on-Avon, and that he declared that
there was no sight in the world equal to the Life Guards on their
superb black horses. But his real appreciation of the greatness of
England is not to be looked for in the jottings of the tourist; it
stands forth conspicuously in his few but singularly weighty early
political writings. The English politician whom he most admired was
Pitt. The preference was striking in a young man who was considered a
dangerous liberal in his own country. It showed amongst other things
an adoption of an English standpoint in appraising English policy
which is rare in a foreigner. "In attacking France," Cavour wrote,
"Pitt preserved social order in England, and kept civilisation in the
paths of that regular and gradual progress which it has followed
ever since." He said of him: "He loved power not as an end but as a
means"--words which long after he applied to himself: "You know that
I care nothing for power as power; I care for it only as a means to
compass the good of my country."

Cavour had the cast of mind which admires in others its own qualities.
As he revered Pitt's "vast and puissant intelligence," so he
sympathised with Peel's logic and courage. Peel was his favourite
among his contemporaries; he called him "the statesman who more
than any other had the instinct of the necessity of the moment." He
foretold Peel's abolition of the Corn Laws at a time when no one else
anticipated it. When he himself was charged by his old friends in the
Turin Chamber with desertion and treason, he reminded them that the
same charges had been made against Peel, but that he was largely
compensated by the knowledge that he had saved England from socialist
commotions, which in that country were in reality even more
threatening in their scope and extent than in the rest of agitated
Europe. He used to say that if Pitt had lived in times of peace he
would have been a reformer after the fashion of Peel and Canning,
adding his own venturesomeness to the largeness of views of the one
and the capable sound sense of the other.

These scattered judgments are drawn from the essays written by Cavour
in the years 1843-46. They appeared in Swiss or French reviews at a
period when it was easier to make a reputation by a magazine article
than it is now. Cavour's monographs attracted attention by the
writer's display of independent thought and firsthand information. The
most interesting now is that on "the condition and future of Ireland,"
which has been often referred to in the British Parliament. Most of
the suggestions made in it have been long since carried into effect,
but it is not these that make the essay still worth reading: it is
Cavour's mode of approaching the question. He writes as what has been
lately called an "Imperialist," though it was formerly thought enough
to say "Englishman." It is doubtful if any foreign publicist ever
wrote in the same spirit on the relations of England and Ireland
either before or since. It is only necessary to be familiar with the
continental press, from Legitimist to Socialist, to know, what he
knew himself, that Cavour was almost in a minority of one. He was not
acquainted with a single English politician; no one influenced him; he
judged the Irish question from the study of history past and present,
and having formed an unpopular opinion, he was prepared to stand by
it. He never held that politics are a game of chance; he believed that
they are subject to fixed laws of cause and effect, and he worked out
political problems by seeking and applying these laws to the case in
point without passion or prejudice. Having satisfied himself that the
union of Ireland and England was for the good of both, he was not
disposed to quarrel with the means by which it was accomplished. When
Pitt failed to carry the Bill for the Union through the Irish House of
Commons, he resorted to the expedient, "which had never failed in the
Dublin Parliament," of corruption on a large scale. He bought rotten
boroughs; he was prodigal of places, honours, pensions, and at the
end of a year he obtained a majority of 168 votes against 73. Was he
wrong? Cavour thought not, though he found no words strong enough to
condemn the men who sold their conscience for place or gold. Public
opinion, he said, has always sanctioned in governments the use of a
different morality from that binding on individuals. In all ages an
extreme indulgence has been shown towards immoral acts which brought
about great political results. He conceded, for the sake of argument,
that such indulgence might be a fatal error; but he insisted that if
Pitt's character was to be blackened because he used parliamentary
corruption, the same censure ought in justice to be extended to the
greatest monarchs of past times, Louis XIV., Joseph II., Frederic the
Great, who, to serve their own ends, outraged the immovable principles
of humanity and morality in a far graver manner than could be laid to
the charge of the illustrious statesman who consolidated the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

On Cavour's own grounds, those of expediency, it might be objected
that a bargain which on one side you allow to be discreditable leaves
the legacy of an indestructible desire on that side to wipe out
the discredit by tearing it up. Though Cavour became great by his
connection with a movement which, before all things, was swayed by
sentiment, he never entirely recognised the part that sentiment plays
in politics. He blamed O'Connell for demanding repeal, which, even if
possible to obtain, would do as much harm to Ireland as to England,
instead of supporting measures that would remove all cause for Irish
discontent. Had he lived long enough he would have seen all those
measures passed, but he would not have seen the end to Irish
discontent. This might have surprised him, but not so much as to see a
great English party advocating disunion, which, he declared, could be
logically supported only "by those who thought it desirable that there
should be a revolution."

Cavour noticed and deplored the unpopularity of England on the
Continent. Extreme parties, opposed in everything else, were agreed
in a violent hatred of that country. The moderate party liked it in
theory, but in reality they had no natural sympathy with it. Only a
few individuals who rose superior to the passions of the multitude
felt the esteem due to a nation which had powerfully contributed to
develop the moral and material resources of the world, and whose
mission was far from ended. The masses were almost everywhere hostile
to it. It was a mistake to suppose that this was the feeling of France
alone; it might be expressed more loudly there, but it was, in fact,
universal. The enemies of progress and the partisans of political
subversion looked on England as their worst adversary: the former
charged her with being the hotbed of revolutionary propagandism; the
latter, perhaps with more reason, considered the English aristocracy
as the corner-stone of the social edifice of Europe. England ought to
be popular with the friends of gradual reform and regular progress,
but a host of prejudices, recollections, passions, produced the
contrary effect. With but little alteration the lines here condensed
might have been written to-day.

A book on railways by Count Petitti had been prohibited in Piedmont.
That railways were connected with the Powers of Darkness was then a
general opinion, shared in particular by Pope Gregory. Cavour reviewed
the book in the _Revue nouvelle_, which was also prohibited, but
sundry copies of it were smuggled into Italy, and one even reached
the king. While Petitti had avoided all political allusions, Cavour's
article abounds in them: railways would promote the moral union of
Italy, which must precede the conquest of national independence.
Municipal jealousies, intellectual backwardness, would disappear, and,
when that happened, nothing could prevent the accomplishment of the
object which was the passionate desire of all--emancipation. A very
small number of ideas forms the intellectual hinge of man in the
aggregate; of these patriotism is only second in importance to
religion. Any conception of national dignity in the masses was
impossible without the pride of nationality. Every private interest,
every political dissension, should be laid aside that Italian
independence might become a fact. Cavour always spoke of Italy--not of
Piedmont, not of Lombardy and Venetia. Rome, still of all cities the
richest in precious memories and splendid hopes, would be the centre
of an iron network uniting the whole peninsula. Some well-intentioned
patriots objected to the increase of railway communication with
Austria from the fear that it would strengthen her military and
political hold over her Italian provinces. Cavour answered that the
great events at hand could not be delayed by the shortening of the
number of hours between Vienna and Milan. On the other hand, when the
relations arising out of conquest were replaced by those of friendship
and equity, rapid communication would promote the moral and
intellectual intercourse, "which, more than any one, we desire,"
between grave and profound Germany and intelligent Italy. In these
pages Cavour foreshadowed the boring of the Alps and the German
alliance, two facts which then seemed equally improbable.

The man was made; he waited for his opportunity. What if it never
came? Can we conceive Cavour's immense energy limited to a rice-field?
Are there really men whom their lot forbids--

  Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
    The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
  To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
    And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes?

The prophet may cry aloud in the desert, the scientific discoverer may
guess at truths which his age rejects, but the total waste of such a
force as the mind of Cavour seems less easy to imagine than that his
appearance was a sign that the times were ripe for him.




CHAPTER III

THE JOURNALIST


In 1846, Cavour was only known at home as the most unpopular man in
Piedmont. Most people can scarcely be said to be unpopular before they
have occupied any public position, but this, strangely enough, was the
case with Cavour. He was simply a private person, but he was hated
by all parties. His writings, which had made their mark abroad, were
little known in Italy; the reviews in which they appeared could only
be obtained by stealth. No one rightly knew what his views were, but
every one disliked him. Solaro de la Margherita, the retrograde prime
minister, was detested by the liberals, but he had a strong following
among the old Savoyard nobility; Lorenzo Valerio, the radical
manufacturer, was harassed by those in power, but he was adored by the
people; Cavour was in worse odour with both parties than these two men
were with either. Under the porticoes of Turin petty private talk took
the place of anything like public discussion. "By good fortune," as
the prime minister put it, "the press was not free in Piedmont;" quite
the reverse. Gossip, especially spiteful gossip, reigned supreme.
Gossip in both spheres of society was all against Cavour. What might
be called the Court party (though whether the king belonged to it or
it to the king was not clear), with the tenacious memory of small
coteries, still recollected Cavour as the self-willed student of the
Military Academy. Charles Albert himself made an occasional polite
inquiry of the Marquis as to his son's travels and his visits to
prisons and hospitals, but, unless report erred, he was speaking of
him to others as the most dangerous man in his kingdom. The degree
to which Cavour was hated by the conservatives is shown by one small
fact: he was treasurer of an Infant Asylum, but it was thought
necessary privately to ask him to retire for the good of the charity,
his connection with which set all the higher society against it. The
case with the radicals was no better. He belonged to an agricultural
association in which Valerio was a leading spirit; one day he asked
leave to speak, upon which almost all the members present left the
building. On this side, no doubt part of the antipathy arose from
the popular feeling against Cavour's father, who still occupied the
invidious and ill-defined office of Vicario. No particular ferocity
was laid at his door, but he was supposed to serve up all the private
affairs of the good Turinese to the king, and if any one got into
trouble he was thought to be the cause. When the liberals triumphed,
the first thing they did was to oblige him to resign. Then Cavour's
elder brother, though not retrograde on economic subjects, was a
conservative of the old school in politics. In later days Gustavo
always voted against Camillo. In politics the brothers were in
admirable agreement to differ; in fact, after the first trifling jars,
they dwelt to the end in unruffled harmony in the family palace, Via
dell' Arcivescovado. At the time when Gustavo was much better known at
Turin than Camillo the suspicious radical could not persuade himself
that one brother was not as much of an aristocrat as the other.
When Mr. Cobden was cordially received by both Marquis and Count,
a would-be wit exclaimed, "There goes Free-trade in the charge of
Monopoly," which was understood to refer to the false accusation
that the Cavours had stored up a quantity of grain in that year of
scarcity, 1847, in order to sell it dear, the truth being simply that
the improved cultivation introduced at Leri had secured fair crops in
a bad season.

The festivities in honour of the English Free-trader were promoted all
over Italy by Italians who were soon to become famous. The fact that
Cobden was an Englishman, even more than the outwardly harmless object
of his campaign, deterred the different governments from interfering
with him. Cavour proposed the health of the guest of the evening at
the Cobden banquet at Turin, but almost immediately after, he retired
to Leri, as he did not wish it to appear that he meant to embark on
public life while the existing political dead-lock lasted. There was
only room for conspirators or for those who extended toleration to the
_régime_ in force. It is doubtful if anything would have driven Cavour
to conspiracy against his own king, and he would have considered it
a personal disgrace to be mixed up with the men then in power. He
thought, therefore, that he could best serve his country by keeping
himself in reserve. He realised the futility of small concessions, and
the childishness of agitating to obtain them. He was the only
strong royalist who understood how far reform must go when it once
began--farther towards democracy than his own sympathies would have
carried him. If you want to use a mill-stream you must let it flow.

The situation in Piedmont was briefly this: Charles Albert's heart was
with the growing cry for independence, but he wished for independence
without liberty. This was the "secret of the king" which has been
sought for in all kinds of recondite suppositions: this was the key to
his apparently vacillating and inconsistent character. Yet he revealed
it himself in some words spoken to Roberto d'Azeglio, the elder
brother of Massimo. "Marquis d'Azeglio," he said, "I desire as much
as you do the enfranchisement of Italy, and it is for that reason,
remember well, that I will never give a constitution to my people."
While his government was a priestly despotism, he employed his leisure
in translating the sublime appeals to national sentiment in the
history of the Maccabees, of which, by a curious coincidence, Mazzini
once said that it seemed written for Italians. Charles Albert made the
mistake of forgetting the age in which he lived. His ancestors fought
the stranger without troubling themselves about representative
government--why should not he? But his ancestors represented in their
own persons the nerve and sinew of the State, its most adventurous
spirit, its strongest manhood, whereas Charles Albert represented only
the party of reaction which was with him in his absolutism but not
in his patriotism. He was accused of having changed sides, but, even
allowing his complicity in the movement of 1821 to have been greater
than he admitted, it is plain that the one thing which drew him into
that movement was its championship of Italian independence. Unlike the
Neapolitan revolutionists who disclaimed adventures for the freeing
of Italy, at least till they had made sure of their own freedom, the
liberals of Piedmont rose with the avowed purpose of rushing into an
immediate war with Austria. A madder scheme was never devised, but the
madness of one day is often the wisdom of the next. In politics really
disinterested acts bear fruit, whatever be their consequences to
individuals.

The question which agitated all minds in 1847 was whether or not
Charles Albert could be gained to the liberal cause. Many despaired,
for by many even his Italian ambition was denied. Cavour had no
favourable opinion of the king, but it was one of his theories that
erroneous ideas always yield in the end to facts. He believed that
Charles Albert's support could be secured if he were fully persuaded
that the interests of his dynasty were not imperilled. He was not
afraid, as others were, that even after the first surrender the
wavering mind of the king would make retrogression probable; he
understood that, if reforms were more difficult to obtain in Piedmont
than elsewhere, they would be more durable when obtained. At last a
concession of real value was wrung from the king: the censure was
revoked. Cavour saw that the press, which till then had been a cipher,
would instantly become of vast importance. He left his retirement to
found a newspaper, to which he gave the name by which the Italian
movement will be known in history--_Il Risorgimento_. He was not a
born journalist, but he set himself with his usual determination to
learn the art. In after times he said that the experience gained in a
newspaper office was almost as profitable to him as the knowledge
of mathematics. Count Cesare Balbo was asked by Cavour to write the
prospectus of the new journal, in which its aims were described as
Independence, union between the princes and people, and reforms.
Cavour's name appeared as acting and responsible editor.

Balbo's work, _Le Speranze d'Italia_, had lately created an
impression, only second to that made by the Primato of Gioberti.
Practical men like Cavour preferred the simple programme which Balbo
put forward--the liberation of Italy from foreign yoke before all
things--to Gioberti's mystical outpourings, much as they pleased
the general. Gioberti, once a follower of Mazzini, and afterwards a
priest, imagined a United Italy, with the Pope at its head, which, to
unthinking souls, seemed to be on the road to miraculous realisation
when the amiable and popular Cardinal Mastai Feretti was invested with
the tiara. Cavour never had any hope in the Papacy as a political
institution.

The Genoese, impatient of the extreme slowness with which reforms were
meted out, proposed to send a deputation with a petition for a civic
guard, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, to whom the delay was
attributed, and who were regarded as the worst enemies of the liberal
Pope. The principal editors, with other influential citizens of Turin,
met at the Hôtel d'Europe to consider how the deputation should be
received, and if their demands were to be supported. The list of the
journalists present comprises the best names in the country; it would
be difficult to find more distinguished or disinterested pressmen than
those who were then writing for the Piedmontese newspapers. Valerio
was there to represent his new journal, _Concordia_, in which he
carried on war to the knife with Cavour. His high personal character,
as well as his talents, made him no inconsiderable opponent. It was at
this meeting that Cavour first entirely revealed himself. He showed
that faith in _the prudence of daring_ which was the keynote to his
great strokes of policy. The demands of the Genoese, he said, were not
too large, but too small. They hit wide of the mark, and the second of
them was idle, because the king, while he remained an absolute prince,
was certain not to consent to it. The government was now neither one
thing nor the other; it had lost the authority of an autocracy, and
had not gained that of a _régime_ based on the popular will. The
situation was intolerable and dangerous; what was wanted was not this
or that reform, but a constitution.

Constitutions seem tame to us now, but to speak of a constitution at
Turin on January 18, 1848, was almost as audacious as it would be to
speak of it at St. Petersburg at the present time. Europe stood at the
brink of a precipice, but knew it not. The news had only just spread
of the first symptom of revolution--the rising in Sicily. Cavour's
speech was a moral bomb-shell. Most politicians begin by asking for
more or less than the measure which finally contents them; those
who cried for a republic have been known to put up with a limited
monarchy; those who preached the most moderate reforms, at a later
stage have danced round trees of liberty. Cavour asked at once
for what he wanted and all that he wanted as far as the internal
organisation of the State was concerned. From first to last he
believed that a constitutional monarchy was the only form of
government which, in a country like Italy, could combine freedom with
order. Under no narrower system would he accept office, and when in
office nothing could make him untrue to his constitutional faith; "no
state of siege" was the axiom of his political life.

How his proposal was received shows the difficulties with which he had
to contend from the outset. The more moderate members of the meeting
thought that he had taken leave of his senses. This was natural. Less
natural was the tooth and nail opposition of Valerio, who declared
that a constitution much exceeded the desires of the people, and that
a petition for it would only frighten the king. He carried all the
radicals with him except Brofferio, an honest patriot and the writer
of charming poems in the Piedmontese dialect, which gave him a great
popularity. Brofferio was an ultra-democrat, but he was no party man,
and he had the courage to walk over to the unpopular editor of the
_Risorgimento_ with the remark, "I shall always be with those who ask
the most." Valerio made no secret among his private friends of the
real reasons of his conduct. What was the good of wasting efforts on
some sort of English constitution, perhaps with a House of Lords and
other such abominations? Was it likely that anything worth having
would be excogitated by Milord Camillo, the greatest reactionary in
the kingdom, the sworn foe of revolution, "un Anglomane pur sang?" A
constitution could only check the revolution and stifle the legitimate
aspirations of the people. The nickname of "Milord Camillo" or "Milord
_Risorgimento_" was in everyone's mouth when speaking of Cavour.

A short time sufficed to show not only the expediency but the
necessity of granting a constitution, and that at once. Events never
moved so fast as in the first two months of 1848. The throne of Louis
Philippe was tottering, and, with the exception of the Duke of Modena,
the princelings of Italy snatched the plank of safety of a statute
with the alacrity of drowning men. In this crisis Charles Albert
thought of abdication. Besides the known causes of his hesitancy,
there was one then unknown: the formal engagement, invented by
Metternich and forced upon him by his uncle Charles Felix, to govern
the country as he found it governed. He called the members of the
royal family together and informed them that if there must be a
constitution there must, but the decree which bestowed it would be
signed by his son. The queen and the Duchess of Savoy, who were both
extremely afraid of him, sat in silence; the handsome Duke of Genoa
tried to prove that constitutions were not such dreadful things;
Victor Emmanuel opposed his intention of abdicating in resolute terms.
Then he summoned a high ecclesiastic, who succeeded in convincing him
that it would be a greater sin to abandon his people in their need
than to break a promise he could no longer maintain. After mortifying
the flesh with fasts and vigils, he yielded, and the famous decree
bore the signature "C. Alberto" after all,--not written indeed in the
king's usually beautiful character, but betraying rather a trembling
hand, which nevertheless registered a great because a permanent
fact. This was not the prelude to perjury and expulsion. Around the
Sardinian statute were united the scattered limbs of Italy, and after
fifty years Charles Albert's grandson commemorated its promulgation at
the Capitol.

Not a man in the crowd at Turin dared to anticipate such a result:
yet their joy was frantic. Fifty thousand people, arranged in guilds,
defiled before the king, who sat like a statue on his bay horse,
upright and impassible. Cavour walked in the company of journalists,
and all those who had opposed him a few weeks before were there too,
with Valerio at their head. They sang their strophe of Mameli's hymn,
"Fratelli d'Italia," very badly. Cavour whispered to his neighbour,
"We are so many dogs!"

That neighbour, a Milanese named Giuseppe Torelli, has left an
interesting description of Cavour's appearance as it was then. He was
fresh-coloured, and his blue eyes had not yet lost their brightness,
but they were so changeful in expression that it was difficult to fix
their distinctive quality. Though rather stout he was not ungainly, as
he tended to become later. He stooped a little, and two narrow lines
were visible on either side of a mouth, cold and uneffusive; but these
lines, by their trembling or contraction, showed the play of inward
emotion which the rest of the face concealed. In after days people
used to watch them in order to guess his state of mind. It was his
large and solid forehead that chiefly gave the idea of power which
every one who saw him carried away, despite of the want of dignity in
his person and of strongly-marked features in his face. His manners
were simple, but distinguished by an unmistakably aristocratic ease
and courtesy. He spoke generally low and without emphasis, and always
appeared to pay great attention to what was said to him, even by the
least important person.

Nothing, on the face of it, could seem more extraordinary than the
exclusion of Cavour from office in the momentous year of 1848. But
he had no popular party at his back whose cry could overrule the
disinclination which the king certainly felt towards making him his
Minister. Moreover, his abilities, though now generally recognised,
contributed to keeping him in the background: it was felt
instinctively that if he got the reins there would be only one driver.
He was known to be indifferent to criticism, and while he listened
patiently to advice, he rarely took it. He had mortally offended the
conservatives by the liberalism of his means, and the liberals by the
conservatism of his ends. Count Balbo, on assuming the office of the
first Prime Minister under the Statute, not only retired from the
directing council of the _Risorgimento_, but went out of his way to
disavow the policy supported in it by Cavour. "The little rascal," he
was heard to say, "will end by ruining the splendid edifice raised
by the wisdom and moderation of so many estimable men!" The
splendid edifice was on the verge of being nearly ruined, but by
timidity--which has lost a score of thrones,--not by audacity. The new
Cabinet entered upon their duties on March 16. Two days later
occurred an event utterly unforeseen--the rising of Milan against the
Austrians. It took them unprepared. They had talked so much about war
that perhaps they thought it would happen in the next century. When
the "now or never" sounded, which does sound sooner or later in all
human affairs, they hesitated or suffered the king to hesitate, which
came to the same thing. That Charles Albert stood for one instant in
doubt when the hour was come desired by him all his life, as he had
often stated, and there is no reason to think untruly, is possibly the
most serious stain on his memory. There are moments when to reflect
is criminal: a man has no right to reflect when his mother is in a
burning house. The reflections which held Charles Albert back were
two. He was afraid that the Milan revolution would breed a republic,
and he was afraid of England and of Russia. England, which during the
previous autumn had sent Lord Minto to urge upon the Italian princes
a line of policy rightly described by Prince Metternich as inevitably
leading to an attack on Austria, now applied the whole force of her
diplomacy to stop the ball she had herself set running. The spectacle
of Lord Palmerston trying to save or serve Austria, which he detested,
in obedience to the atavistic tendencies of the Foreign Office, is
a lesson in history. For English politicians of whatever party or
private sentiments, Austria was still what Lord Castlereagh called
her: "The great hinge on which the fate of Europe must ultimately
depend." Sir Ralph Abercromby assured the king that "the least act of
aggression" would place his throne in jeopardy. His throne was already
in jeopardy, but from the contrary reason. Each minute that passed
while the Milanese were fighting their death struggle and he stood
inactive threatened to deprive him and his house of that power of
progress on which not only their fortune but their existence depended.

The news from Milan reached Turin on March 19; on the 23rd, the last
of the Milan days, king and ministry were still hesitating. On that
day Cavour printed in the _Risorgimento_ the most impassioned piece
of writing that ever came from his pen. The conservative, the
reactionary, once more cried aloud that audacity was prudence,
temerity wisdom. The supreme hour of the Savoy dynasty had struck,
the hour of strong resolves, on which hangs the fate of empires, the
destinies of peoples. Hesitation, doubt, delay, were no more possible:
they could only prove fatal. "We, men of calm minds, accustomed to
listen more to the dictates of reason than to the impulses of the
heart, after deliberately weighing each word we utter, are bound in
conscience to declare that only one path is open to the nation, the
government, the king: war, immediate war!" It was said, he continued,
that Russia and England were on the point of uniting against Italy. In
common times such an argument would be conclusive, not now. When Milan
was struggling for life, was perhaps getting worsted, at all costs
they were bound to fly to the rescue. Duty, brotherhood, policy,
commanded it. Woe unto them if they crossed the frontier to find that
Milan had fallen.

Russia, through her ambassador, intimated that she would regard the
crossing of the Ticino as a _casus belli._ The threat made less
impression at Turin than the warnings of Sir Ralph Abercromby; it was
the possibility of English intervention, therefore, that Cavour went
on to examine. The _Anglomane_ "Milord _Risorgimento_" was less
surprised at the current of English official thought than were his
radical critics, but would any English minister, he asked, enter on a
European war to prevent the liberation of Italy, which was an object
sacred in the eyes of the mass of the English people? He believed it
to be impossible, but were it so, so be it! England would have against
her a mighty coalition, not of princes, as in former days, but of
peoples, in the old world and in the new. Victory in such a matricidal
strife would be as fatal to the first-born of liberty as defeat.

Thus Cavour was prepared to fight Austria, Russia, and England. The
division of parties at that time was in its essence the division of
those who were willing to accept a republican solution and those
who were not. It does not follow that all the liberals wished for a
republic, but they would all have taken office under it. Of this there
is little doubt. Cavour never would have become a republican any more
than an absolutist minister. But he saw what the other conservatives
failed to see, that the dynasty of Savoy could only live if it led.

On March 22, Charles Albert was still assuring the Austrian Ambassador
that his intentions were pacific. Next day Cavour's article appeared,
and in the evening the king decided for instant war. Only two of
the ministers assented at once; the others gave in after a long
discussion. War was declared on the 25th. Time lost cannot be
recalled; the happy moment had been let go by; Piedmont went not to
Lombardy engaged in a dangerous struggle, but to Lombardy victorious.
Cavillers said that the king had come to eat the fruits others had
gathered. Confidence in the ultimate result reached the point of
madness, but with revolution stalking through the streets of Vienna
the Austrian eagle seemed to have lost its talons. In May 1848, in
Austria itself, Lombardy was looked upon as completely lost, and with
it the Southern Tyrol as far as Meran, for no one at that period
thought of separating this Italian district from Italy; the most
sanguine Austrians only hoped to save Venetia. Radetsky alone expected
to save all, because he knew what he could do, and he had judged
Sardinian generalship correctly. Charles Albert's staff seemed to have
but one idea--to reverse the tactics which had led the first Napoleon
to victory on the same ground.

The brightest gleam of success which shone on the king of Sardinia's
arms was at Goito, in the battle of May 30. It was on that occasion
that Cavour's nephew, Augusto di Cavour, was killed. The _enfant
terrible_ grew up to be a young man of singular promise, on whom
Cavour had fixed all his hopes for the future of his name and house.
His uncle's last letter of encouragement to do his duty was found on
Augusto's body. The blow unnerved Cavour; he was found lying prostrate
in an agony of speechless grief. Through his life he kept the
blood-stained uniform in which the young officer received his
death-wound in a glass case in his bedroom, a piece of enduring
sentiment which shows how unlike Cavour was the coldly calculating
egotist whose portrait has passed for his.

The story of the years of revolution in Italy is a story of great
things and small, like most human records; but, when all is said, the
great predominate, for no blunders could efface the readiness for
self-sacrifice displayed by the whole people. The experience of these
years was bitter, but possibly necessary. It destroyed illusions.
It showed, for instance, that in the nineteenth century a free and
independent Italy under the hegemony of the Pope belonged to political
mythology. Here was a Pope who was, at heart, patriotic, but who drew
back at the crucial moment, precisely as Mazzini (almost alone) had
predicted. The first threat of a schism was enough to make him wear
dust and ashes for his patriotism. The Bourbons of Naples were
ascertained to have learnt nothing and unlearnt nothing; perfidy alone
could be expected from them. It was proved that the princes of the
other states, Piedmont excepted, must gravitate towards Austria even
if they did not wish it. All this was useful, if dearly bought,
knowledge.

At the first general elections in Piedmont, Cavour failed to obtain a
seat. He told the electors in his address that he had always desired
_Italia unita e libera_, and if "united" did not yet imply "under
one king," the phrase was still significant. Two months later he was
elected in four divisions; probably the death of his nephew in
the interim on the field of battle modified, for the time, his
unpopularity. He took his seat for the first college of Turin. He did
not make an immediate impression; his short stature, and still more
the imperfect accent with which he spoke Italian, were not in his
favour. French was allowed in the Sardinian Chamber, but Cavour never
opened his lips in it in Parliament. By degrees his speeches became
marvels of close reasoning, and they even soared, sometimes, when
he was deeply moved, into a kind of eloquence superior to that of
rhetoric, but the accent was never such as would satisfy a fastidious
ear. The day came, however, when people hung with too much anxiety on
the least of his utterances for any one to notice this defect. Cavour
sat on the Right, and from the first he horrified his colleagues on
the same benches by the enunciation of views which to them were rank
heresies. They existed in a state of perpetual uneasiness as to what
he might say or do next.

Cavour was not re-elected when Parliament was dissolved in January
1849; he was therefore not in the Chamber during the debates which
preceded and followed the last desperate throw of Novara. A letter
written by him six days after the battle shows what he thought of
those events. The Conservative party, he says, which represented the
great majority in the country, had been badly supported by it (an
assertion as true now as then). The king threw himself into the arms
of demagogues who thought that freedom and independence were to be won
by phrases and proclamations. The army had been disheartened, the best
officers kept inactive; twelve months' sacrifices of men and money
placed them in a worse condition than before the Milan revolution.
Self-love might, he concluded, warp his judgment, but he had the
intimate conviction that, if he had held the reins of power, he could
have saved the country without any effort of genius, and planted the
Italian flag on the Styrian Alps. But his friends joined with his foes
to keep him out of power, and he had passed his time in deploring
faults which it would have been very easy to avoid.

Remembering what Cavour afterwards accomplished, these are words which
should not be set lightly aside. Yet it is possible that the complete
disaster into which Charles Albert rushed at Novara was the only thing
to save the country and to lay the foundations of Italian unity. The
king was more eager for war than the most unthinking democrat. Reviled
by all parties, he sought the great conciliator, death. "The Italians
will never trust me," he exclaimed. "My son, Victor, will be king of
Italy, not I." When the death he would have chosen was denied him, he
went away, a crownless exile. He could do no more.

It was necessary, as Charles Albert had seen, that the king who was to
carry out the destinies of Italy should be trusted. Victor Emmanuel
came to the throne with few advantages; he was unpopular, his private
friends were said to be reactionaries, his brusque manners offended
most people. He had practically no advisers in these critical moments,
but the moral courage with which he refused the Austrian offers of
lenient terms if he would repudiate the Statute and his father's word,
won for him the nation's trust, which he never lost. Cavour, with all
his genius, could not have made the kingdom of Italy if the Italians
had doubted their king.




CHAPTER IV

IN PARLIAMENT


The condition of Italy, Cavour said, was worse at the end of the
year's struggle than at the beginning. Such was the case, if the
present only were looked at. When Austria resumed her sway in Lombardy
and Venetia she resumed it by the right of the conqueror, a more
intelligible, and in a sense a more legitimate, right than that
derived from bargains and treaties in which the population had no
voice. The House of Hapsburg was saved in Italy by one loyal servant,
Radetsky, and in Hungary by the Ban of Croatia and 200,000 Russians.
Besides the regained supremacy in the Lombardo-Veneto, Austria was
more predominant in the centre and south than in the palmiest days of
the Holy Alliance. A keen observer might have held that she was too
predominant to be safe. Talleyrand always said that if Italy were
united under Austria she would escape from her, not sooner or later,
but in a few years. There was not political unity, but there may
almost be said to have been moral unity. Even in Rome, in spite of the
French garrison, Austrian influence counted for much more than French.
When Victor Emmanuel gave the premiership to Massimo d'Azeglio, Cavour
remarked that he was glad of the appointment, and equally so that
D'Azeglio had not asked him to be his colleague, because in the actual
circumstances it seemed to him difficult or impossible to do any good.
D'Azeglio could not have offered Cavour a portfolio without undoing
the effect of his own appointment, by which confidence in Victor
Emmanuel was confirmed. The king was not sufficiently known for it to
be wise to place beside him an unpopular man, a suspected _codino_,
the nickname ("pig-tail") given to reactionaries. D'Azeglio, who was
really prepared to go far less far than Cavour, was almost loved
even by his political enemies, a wonderful phenomenon in Italy. His
patriotism had been lately sealed by the severe wound he received
at Vicenza. To rigid principles he added attractive and chivalric
manners, which smoothed his relations with the young king, who, if
brusque himself, did not like brusqueness in others.

Cavour retired, as became his wont, to enjoy the sweetness of
rural leisure at Leri: for him the sovereign remedy to political
disquietude. The well-cultivated fields, the rich grass lands, in the
contemplation of which he took a peaceful but lively satisfaction,
restored as usual his mental equilibrium, and brought back the
hopefulness of his naturally sanguine temperament. Before long he was
exhorting his friends to be of good cheer; while liberty existed in
a single corner of the peninsula there was no need to despair; if
Piedmont kept her institutions free from despotism and anarchy, these
would be the means of working efficaciously for the regeneration of
the country. To those who went to see him he said, rubbing his hands
(a sure sign that he was regaining his spirits), "We shall begin
again, and, profiting by past mistakes, we shall do better next time."
Probably he foresaw that "next time" he would have the game in his own
hands.

The king had done his part by proving his resolve to uphold the
constitution, but all danger for liberty in Piedmont did not cease
there. The members of the party which had ruled during the earlier
years of Charles Albert's reign did not give themselves up for lost.
They cherished the hope of using the constitution to overturn liberty.
On the face of things, the moral to be drawn from recent history
was for and not against them. They could say that the only patent
consequence of the change of system was that the country had been
plunged in disaster, that blood and money had been wasted with no
other effect than a bankrupt exchequer, a beaten army, trade at a
standstill, misery stalking through the land. This party, which was
by no means weak, could reckon on the compact support of Savoy, where
Italian patriotism was as scarce as true and chivalric attachment to
the royal house was abundant. Above all, it had the support of the
whole power of the Church, which, through its corporations and
religious orders and its army of priests, exercised an influence
in Piedmont unparalleled in Austria or in Spain. If the liberal
institutions of the country were to be preserved, it was necessary to
strike a blow at this party by weakening the arch on which it reposed.
Religious toleration had been proclaimed in Piedmont as one of the
first reforms, the concession having been obtained from Charles Albert
by the Marquis Robert d'Azeglio, a conservative and a profoundly
convinced Catholic, but a lover of justice and mercy, who esteemed
it the happiest day of his life when, through his interposition,
the faithful Vaudois were granted the rights of free citizens. But
legislation had not yet touched the extraordinary privileges arrogated
to itself by the Church. One of these, the _Foro ecclesiastico_, a
special court for the judgment of ecclesiastical offenders against
the common law, it was now proposed to abolish. It was a test
measure--like throwing down the gauntlet. Cavour had been re-elected
when the king dissolved Parliament by what is known as the
Proclamation of Moncalieri, and in the debates on the _Foro
ecclesiastico_ for the first time he made his power felt in the
Chamber. He spoke as one who had long thought out the subject and had
chosen his policy: "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's,
and to God the things which are God's."

At this first stage in the long struggle the Roman curia might have
settled the matter in a friendly way, but it would not. Cardinal
Antonelli replied to a respectful invitation, that "the Holy Father
was ready to go to the ante-chamber of the devil's house to please the
king of Sardinia, but he really could not go inside." Yet, at the
same date, the Archbishop of Paris (Sibour) admitted to a Piedmontese
visitor that the Sardinian Government had no option under the new
institutions but to establish the equality of all citizens before the
law, and in Austria they were laughing at the progressive monarchy in
its laborious efforts to obtain reforms carried out in the despotic
empire by Joseph II. The reason that Rome refused to treat was that
she thought herself strong and Sardinia weak. Writers on this period
have too readily assumed that the Church, by the law of its being,
must always cry "no compromise!" Of course nothing can be more
erroneous. The Church has yielded as many times as it thought itself
obliged to yield. What other inference can be deduced from the strange
and romantic story of the suppression of the Jesuits? and, to
cite only one more instance, from the deposition of bishops for
extra-canonical reasons conceded by Pius VII. to the First Consul? The
curia thought that Victor Emmanuel would end at Canossa, but he ended
instead in the Pantheon. It should be remembered, however, that the
quarrel had nothing then to do with the dispute between pope and king
on the broader grounds of the possession of Rome. That dispute was
still in the darkness of the future. Sardinia had not given even moral
support to the Roman Republic.

In Cavour's able speech of March 7, 1850, he observed that his
friends, the Liberal Conservatives, feared the erection of the
priesthood into a party hostile to the State. Peace was precious, but
too heavy sacrifices might be made even to it. He himself trusted that
in the long run the priesthood would recognise the necessity to modern
society of the union of the two great moral forces, religion and
liberty. Europe was threatened with universal revolution; only large
and courageous reforms could stem the tide. M. Guizot might have
saved the throne of Louis Philippe had he yielded to the demand for
electoral reform. Why had there been no revolution in England? Because
the Duke of Wellington in 1829, Lord Grey in 1832, and Sir Robert Peel
in 1846, understood the exigencies of their epoch, proving themselves
thereby to be the first statesmen of the time. Uninfluenced by the
furious attacks on him as an _Anglomane_, Cavour took the first
opportunity of reaffirming from his seat in Parliament the admiration
for English methods which he had constantly expressed outside. He
closed his speech by appealing to Government to persevere in its
policy of large and fearless reforms, which, far from weakening the
constitutional throne, would so strengthen its roots that not only
would Piedmont be enabled to resist the revolutionary storm should it
break around its borders, but also "gathering to itself all the living
forces in Italy, it would be in a position to lead our mother-country
to those high destinies whereunto she is called."

The effect of this peroration was inconceivable. Here was the first
word of hope publicly uttered since the _débâcle_! People in the
galleries who had seen Cavour usually silenced by clamour and howls
heard the applause with astonishment, and then joined in it. All the
ministers rose to shake hands with the speaker. Any other man would
have become popular at once, but against Cavour prejudice was too
strong for a fleeting success to remove it. From that day, however,
he was listened to. He was no longer a _quantité négligeable_ in the
politics of Italy or of Europe.

One of the ministers, Count Pietro di Santa Rosa, died within a few
months of the bill on the _Foro_ becoming law, and the last sacraments
were denied to him because he refused to sign a retractation of the
political acts of the cabinet of which he was a member. Cavour was an
old friend of Santa Rosa. He was present when he died, and he heard
from the Countess the particulars of the distressing scene when the
priest in the harshest manner withheld the consolations of religion
from the dying man, who was a pious Catholic, but who had the strength
of mind even in death not to dishonour himself and his colleagues.
Cavour wrote an indignant article in the _Risorgimento_ denouncing the
party spite which could cause such cruel anguish under a religious
cloak, and the people of Turin became so much excited that if the
further indignity of a refusal of Christian burial had been resorted
to, as at first seemed probable, the lives of the priests in the city
would hardly have been safe. Everything seemed to point to Cavour as
Santa Rosa's successor, but Massimo d'Azeglio felt nervous at taking
the final step. He was encouraged to it by General La Marmora, the
friend of both, who declared that "Camillo was a _gran buon diavolo_,"
who would grow more moderate when "with us." Cavour accepted the
offered post of Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, but not without
making terms. He exacted the retirement of a minister whom he
considered incurably timorous, especially in ecclesiastical
legislation. The point was yielded, but D'Azeglio said to La Marmora,
"We are beginning badly with your _buon diavolo_." The good Massimo
got no comfort from the king: "Don't you see that this man will turn
you all out?" Victor Emmanuel casually remarked, or rather he made use
of a stronger idiom in his native dialect, which would not well bear
translation. The king refrained from opposing the appointment, but he
did not pretend that he liked it.

About that time Cavour paid a visit to the Piedmontese shore of the
Lago Maggiore, where he made the acquaintance of the author of the
_Promessi Sposi_. Perhaps by reason of his poetic instinct Manzoni
expected great things of him from the first. "That little man promises
very well," he told the poet Berchet. And he opened his heart to
Cavour, telling him that dream of Italian unity which he had always
cherished, but which, as he said in his old age, he kept a secret for
fear of being thought a madman. They looked across the blue line of
water; there, on the other side, was Austria. Had Cavour said what he
thought, he would have responded, "That is the first stone to move."
But he did not enter upon a discussion; he merely murmured, rubbing
his hands, "We shall do something!"

To the end Cavour evoked more ready sympathy among men of the other
provinces than among the Piedmontese, although these last came to
repose the blind trust in him which the Duke of Wellington's soldiers
reposed in their leader--a trust born of the conviction that he would
lead to victory. Latterly this was Victor Emmanuel's own way of
feeling towards Cavour. Sympathy was always lacking.

On taking office Cavour sold his shares in the agricultural and
industrial speculations which he had promoted, with the exception of
one company, then not in a flourishing state, and likely to collapse
if he withdrew his name. He also severed his connection with the
_Risorgimento_, which had cost him much money and made him many
enemies, but he believed that the services rendered by it to the cause
of orderly liberty were incalculable. He never regretted his years of
work in the _antro_, the wild beasts' den, as the advanced liberals
called the office of the journal, a name gaily adopted by himself.
As editor of the _Risorgimento_ he fought his one duel; a scandalous
attack on the personal honesty of the writers was made by a Jewish
financier in an obscure Nizzard sheet; an encounter with pistols
followed in which no one was hurt, but both sides seemed to have aimed
in earnest. There is a tragic absurdity in the possible extinction
of such a life as Cavour's on so paltry an occasion; yet, in the
surroundings in which he moved, he could not have passed over the
worthless attack in the silent contempt it deserved without being
called a coward. At the conclusion of the duel he walked away, turning
his back on his adversary, but no long time elapsed before, as
minister, he was taking trouble to obtain for this man some honorific
bauble which his vanity coveted.

On taking office, Cavour doubted for a moment his own future, the
doubt common to men who reach a position they have waited for too
long. In these times, he wrote, politicians were soon used up;
probably it would be so with him. But the work of his department
dispelled gloomy thoughts: as Minister of Commerce he negotiated
treaties with France, England, and Belgium in which a step was made
towards realising his favourite theories on free trade. Before long he
was also made Minister of the Marine; it was taken for granted that
he could do as much work as two or three other men. Though both these
offices were secondary, Cavour became insensibly leader of the house.
Questions on whatever subject were answered by him, and he was not
careful to consult his chief as to the tenor of his replies. Massimo
d'Azeglio said with a rueful smile that he was now like Louis
Philippe: he ruled, but did not govern. Cavour stated his own
opinions, whether they were popular or unpopular, consonant with those
of his party or directly opposed to them. A deputy asked Government
to interfere with the mode and substance of the teaching in the
seminaries. Cavour immediately answered that he would hold such
interference to be a most fatal act of absolutism; the person to
control the instruction given in the seminaries was the bishop; let
bishops play the part of theologians, not of deputies, and let the
Government govern, and not play the theologian. Some one pointed out
that this was quite at variance with what had been said by the other
ministers; Cavour excused himself towards his colleagues, but repeated
that the principle was one of supreme importance. He had spoken "less
as a minister than as a politician." And he never learnt to speak
otherwise until there was a ministry in which (to borrow a once often
quoted witticism) all the ministers were called Cavour.

The energy with which Cavour repudiated the idea of interfering with
the seminaries is interesting on other grounds. Possibly he was the
only continental statesman who ever saw liberty in an Anglo-Saxon
light. This is further shown by the policy he advocated in dealing
with the Jesuits. He did not like the Society, which he described as a
worse scourge to humanity than communism. You must not judge its real
nature, he said, by observing it where its position is contested and
precarious. Look at it, rather, where it has a loose rein, where it
can apply its rules in a logical and consequent manner, where
the whole education of youth is in its hands. The result is _une
génération abâtardie_. But the remedy he proposed was not repression.
He wished to grant the Jesuits three, four, ten times the liberty they
gave to others in the countries under their power. In a free country
they could do no harm; they would be always obliged to modify and
transform themselves and would never gain a real empire either in the
world of politics or intellect The great Pombal, who may be called the
Cavour of Portugal, took his conception of a free state from England,
like the Italian statesman, but he did not understand that persecution
is an unfortunate way of inaugurating liberty. This is what for Cavour
was "a principle of supreme importance."

In April 1851 Cavour took the office of Minister of Finance; he had
exacted the resignation of his predecessor, Nigra, as the price of
his remaining in the Cabinet. The Minister of Public Instruction also
resigned owing to disagreements with the now all-powerful member
of the Government, and was replaced by a nominee of Cavour's, L.C.
Farini, the Romagnol exile, author of _Lo Stato Romano_, whose
appointment was significant from a national point of view,
notwithstanding his ultra-conservative opinions. Cavour mentioned that
Farini's work had been praised by Mr. Gladstone, "one of the most
illustrious statesmen in Europe," at which the Chamber applauded
wildly, as Cavour intended it to do. Ever watchful for any sign from
abroad which could profit Italy, he was glad of what seemed a chance
opportunity to provoke a demonstration in honour of the writer of the
_Letters to Lord Aberdeen_ on the Neapolitan prisons, which were just
then creating an immense sensation. In Italy Mr. Gladstone was the
most popular man of the hour; in France, still calling itself a
republic, all parties except the reduced ranks of the advanced
liberals were very angry--not with King Bomba, but with his accuser. A
harmless cousin of Mr. Gladstone was blackballed in a club in Paris on
account of the name he bore. Nobody ever had such a good heart as the
king of Naples, Count Walewski went about declaring, in support of
which he told Mr. Monckton Milnes that Ferdinand had recently granted
his request to pardon three hundred prisoners against whom nothing was
proved. "How grateful they must have been," replied the Englishman;
"did not they come and thank you for having obtained their
deliverance?" Taken off his guard and unconscious of the irony,
Walewski made the admission that the three hundred were debarred from
the pleasure of paying him a visit because, though pardoned, they were
not released!

This little story was related to Lord Palmerston, in whom it fanned
the fuel of the indignation roused by Mr. Gladstone's _Letters_, of
which he had written that "they revealed a system of illegality,
injustice, and cruelty which one would not have imagined possible
nowadays in Europe." But he employed still stronger language against
the Austrians, whose method of reimposing their rule in Lombardy had
lost them all their friends in England, for the time at least, and had
worked their foes up to the point of fury. Those were the days when
they sang at Vienna:

  Hat der Teufel einen Sohn,
  So ist er sicher Palmerston.

Lord Palmerston was coming to a conclusion about Italian matters; it
was this: that, great as were the objections to the deliverance of
Italy from the Austrians by French aid, yet it would be better for
her to be delivered so than not at all. The same conclusion had been
reached by Cavour, except that he would not have admitted unending
servitude to be the alternative; he was too patriotic and too
resourceful for that. He kept in view other contingencies: European
complications, the organic disruption of Austria, even at that early
date, the foundation of a German empire. But in 1851, as in 1859, the
aid of France was the one means of shaking off the Austrian yoke,
which was morally certain to succeed For him, however, the French
alliance was only a speck in the distance. He did not think, as Lord
Palmerston seems to have thought, that a French liberating army might
be "very soon" expected in the Lombard plains. When Louis Napoleon
swept away the impediments between himself and the Imperial throne,
Cavour was less moved by the violence of the act than by the hope that
its consequences might be favourable to Italy. The Prince-President
tranquilly awaited the eight million votes which should transform him
from a political brigand into a legitimised emperor, and Cavour left
him to the judgment of his own countrymen. He saw no need to be more
severe than they. It is easy to conceive a higher morality, but as yet
it has not been applied to politics. As Cavour remarked, "Franklin
sought the help of the most despotic monarch in Europe," and the
analogies in recent history do not require to be recalled.

An inferior statesman who, like Cavour, contemplated foreign aid as
an ultimate resource, would have lost his interest and slackened his
activity in home politics. It was not so with him. Before all other
things he placed the necessity of consolidating Piedmont as a
constitutional State, and of preparing her morally and materially to
take her part in the struggle when it came. If that were not done,
a new Bonaparte might indeed cross the Alps in the character of
liberator, but a free Italy would be no more the result of his
intervention than it had been of his uncle's. Cavour was meditating
the stroke of policy which gave him the power to carry out this work
of consolidation and preparation. He ruled the ministry, but he did
not rule the House and, through it, the country. The Sardinian Chamber
of Deputies was composed of the Right Centre, the Extreme Right, the
Left Centre, and the Extreme Left. The Extreme Right was loyal to the
House of Savoy, but contrary to Italian aspirations; the Extreme Left
was strongly Italian, but the degree of its loyalty was hit off in
Massimo d'Azeglio's _mot_ "Viva Vittorio, il re provisorio" ("Long
live Victor, the provisional king"). There remained the two
Centres representing the liberal conservatives and the moderate
liberals--"moderate radicals" would be more correct, if the verbal
contradiction be permitted. But neither of these single-handed could
support a stable and independent government. Every ministry must exist
on the sufferance of its opponents, and in terror of the vagaries of
the advanced section on its own side. At any critical moment a passing
breeze might overthrow it. The only antidote to the recklessness or
obstructiveness of extreme parties lay in dissolution; but to dissolve
a parliament just elected, as Victor Emmanuel had once been forced to
do already, would be a fatal expedient if repeated often. Any student
of representative government would suggest the amalgamation of the two
Centres as the true remedy, but so great were the difficulties in the
way of this, that not half a dozen persons in Piedmont believed it to
be possible. Cavour himself thought about it for a year before making
the final move The acerbities of Italian party politics are not
softened by the good social relations and the general mutual
confidence in purity of motive which prevail in England. Hitherto
Cavour and the brilliant and plausible leader of the Left Centre had
not entertained flattering opinions of each other. Rattazzi thought
Cavour an ambitious and aggressive publicist rather than a patriot
statesman, and Cavour knew Rattazzi to be the minister who led the
country to Novara. But he appreciated his value as a parliamentary
ally; he had the qualities in which Cavour himself was most deficient.
Urbano Rattazzi (born at Alessandria in 1808) was famous as one of the
best speakers at the Piedmontese bar before entering the Chamber.
He was a perfect master of Italian; his manners were popular and
insinuating. He was richly endowed with all those secondary gifts
which often carry a man along faster, though less far, than the
highest endowments. If he had not power, he had elasticity; if not
judgment, cleverness. He always drifted, which made him always appear
the politician up to date. His name was then associated with one
catastrophe; before he died it was to be linked with two others,
Aspromonte and Mentana; but such was his ability as a leader that he
retained a compact following to the last.

Cavour rarely made a man's antecedents a reason for not turning him to
account; but there was one point on which he required to be reassured
before seeking an understanding with Rattazzi--this was whether his
fidelity to the monarchy could be entirely depended on. Cavour's old
friend and fellow worker of the _Risorgimento_, M.A. Castelli, who was
acquainted with the leader of the Left, opportunely bore witness to
Rattazzi's genuine loyalty, and Cavour hesitated no longer to come to
an agreement which every day proved to be more imperative. After
the _Coup d'état_, the Extreme Right, led by the Count de Revel
and General Menabrea, adopted the tactics of professing to believe
untenable the position of a free State wedged in between the old
despotism of Austria and the new one of France. The argument was
ingenious and was likely to make converts. It was urgently necessary
to form a new political combination which should reduce this party to
impotence.

Cavour's compact with Rattazzi was concluded in the first month of
1852, but at first it was kept a profound secret. It was divulged, as
it were, accidentally in the course of a debate on a Bill which was
intended to moderate the attacks of the press on foreign sovereigns.
This was the only form of restriction which Cavour, then and
afterwards, was willing to countenance. He held that the excuse for
umbrage given to foreign rulers by personal invective published in
the newspapers was a danger to the State which no government ought to
tolerate. The Extreme Right and Left were immediately up in arms, the
first declaring that the Bill did not go far enough, and the second
that it went too far. Both affected to consider it the first step to
more stringent anti-liberal measures--invoked by one side and abhorred
by the other. It was then that Rattazzi made the announcement that
although he did not mean to vote for this particular Bill, he intended
to support the Ministry through the session which had just begun,
if, as he believed, this Bill was an isolated measure, and did not
indicate a change of policy. Cavour acknowledged the promise in words
which left no doubt that a prior agreement existed between the two
leaders. He repudiated the reactionary tendencies of Menabrea and
his Savoyards, even, he said ironically, at the risk of so great a
misfortune as that of losing the weak support which they had lately
bestowed on Government, Count de Revel retorted that the Ministry had
divorced the Right and made a marriage (_connubio_) with the party
which drove Charles Albert to his doom and to an exile's death in a
foreign land. The alliance between the Centres was henceforth known by
the nickname thus conferred on it, which has been repeated since by
hundreds who have forgotten its origin.

It is difficult to describe the sensation which this scene created,
and no one was more astonished than D'Azeglio, who, with the other
ministers, had been kept entirely in the dark. By all ordinary
rules Cavour ought to have communicated with his colleagues before
revolutionising the parliamentary chessboard. The more sure he felt
of their opposition the less easy is it to justify him for taking so
grave a step without their knowledge. On public grounds, however
(and these were the only grounds on which Cavour ever acted in his
political life), it was desirable that the _Connubio_ should be an
accomplished fact before it was exposed to discussion. D'Azeglio was
very angry, but he hated scandal, and he refrained from disowning the
act of his imperious colleague. He was none the less determined never
to sit in the same Cabinet with Rattazzi. One reason he gave for it
was characteristic. The leader of the Left had debts, and was not in
a hurry to pay them. When Rattazzi, through Cavour's instrumentality,
was elected President of the Chamber, D'Azeglio felt again aggrieved.
Cavour, who began by treating his chief's antipathy to his new ally
as a prejudice to be made fun of, and in the end dispelled, came
to understand that it was insuperable. To cut short an impossible
situation, he tendered his resignation, on which all the ministers
resigned; but as the question was one of personal pique, the king
commanded them to remain at their posts. Cavour applauded this
decision. For the moment it was better that he, not D'Azeglio, should
be sacrificed. They parted without ceasing to be private and political
friends. Massimo d'Azeglio's nature was too generous to hear a grudge
against the man who was to eclipse him.

Cavour profited by his reconquered liberty to go to France and
England, a journey that relieved him of the appearance of wishing to
hamper the Cabinet, which was quickly reconstructed without himself
and Farini. On the eve of starting he went, as etiquette required, to
take leave of the king, who made the not very flattering remark that
he thought it would be a long while before he called him to power.
Cavour must have smiled behind his spectacles, but he naturally left
time to verify or contradict the royal forecast.




CHAPTER V

THE GREAT MINISTRY


Cavour went abroad with the full intention of preparing for the day
when his voice would be that of Piedmont, if not of Italy. He attached
importance to personal relations, which helped him to keep in touch
with European politics and politicians, and he was anxious to find
out how the _Connubio_ was regarded by foreigners, among whom, till
lately, Rattazzi had been looked upon as a revolutionary firebrand.
But thinking men abroad understood the reasons which had dictated the
coalition. In London Cavour met with a friendly reception from Lord
Malmesbury, who was then Foreign Minister, and who assured him that
the English Government would be glad to see him back in office. With
characteristic presence of mind he framed his answer to provoke a more
definite pronouncement. He could not, he said, return to office
alone or abandon the party he had been at so much pains to create.
"Naturally," answered Lord Malmesbury, "you cannot return to power
without your friends." Reassured as to the sentiments of one great
political party, Cavour approached the other in the person of Lord
Palmerston, than whom he never had a firmer political friend or
more sincere admirer. Lord Palmerston saw the larger meaning of the
experiment of freedom in Piedmont, and he was one of the first to see
it. If that experiment succeeded, the Italian tyrannies were doomed;
how, he did not discern, but the fact was apparent to him. He heard,
therefore, with much interest what Cavour had to tell him of the
gradual taking root of constitutional government in the Sardinian
kingdom, and he promised him the moral support, not of one party or
another, but of England, "in pledge of which," he added, "we have sent
you our best diplomatist." This allusion was to Mr. (afterwards Sir
James) Hudson, whom Lord Palmerston had called back from the Brazils
in the spring of the year, because by a singular intuition he guessed
him to be the very man to help the Italian cause. It was intended to
send him to Florence, but when he reached the Foreign Office, which
Lord Palmerston had just vacated, he received instructions to go to
Turin, a fortunate change of plan. No two men were ever better fitted
to work together than Cavour and Sir James Hudson. Without ceasing to
be particularly English and strictly loyal to the interests of his own
country, the British Minister at Turin served Italy as few of her sons
have been able to do. Beneath a rather cold exterior he concealed the
warmest of hearts, and he had the power of attaching people to him, so
that they never forgot him. It is greatly to be regretted that he left
no record of the stirring years of his mission, which coincided with
the rise and ascendency of Cavour.

Enchanted with the country, and "more _Anglomane_ than ever," Cavour
left England for Paris, where he laid himself out to conciliate
political men of all shades, from Morny to Thiers, who advised him to
be patient and not to lose heart: "If, after giving you vipers
for breakfast, you have another dish served up for dinner, never
mind"--such was the diet of politicians. What Cavour once called "his
powerful intellectual organisation" made an immediate impression
on the Prince President, as he was still styled. Louis Napoleon
cultivated an impassible exterior, but at bottom his character was
emotional, and, like all emotional persons, he was susceptible to the
magnetism of a stronger brain and will. Cavour summoned Rattazzi to
Paris to present him to the future Caesar. "Whether we like it or
not," he wrote at this time, "our destinies depend on France; we must
be her partner in the great game which will be played sooner or later
in Europe." A few weeks later Napoleon declared at Bordeaux that "the
empire was peace," but like all intelligent onlookers Cavour received
the statement with incredulity. Possibly the only person who believed
in it was the speaker--for the moment; he may have thought that "bread
and games" was a formula by which he could rule France, or rather
Paris, but he was soon to find it insufficient.

Cavour sought out several of the Italian exiles who were leading a
life of privation and obscurity in Paris, one of whom was Manin, the
Dictator of Venice. With him Cavour expressed himself "very much
satisfied, though his sentiments were rather too Venetian": sentiments
which Manin sacrificed--a last act of abnegation--when he finally gave
his support to Italian unity under Victor Emmanuel, carrying with him
two-thirds of the republican party, who could brave the charge of
changed allegiance if so incorruptible a patriot led the way. Cavour
also saw Gioberti, "always the same child of genius, who would have
been a great man had he had common sense." Gioberti, however, had
made a great stride towards common sense, for instead of dreaming of
liberating popes, he was now imagining a renovating statesman, and
he had inscribed Cavour's name under his new portrait. In a book
published in Paris, Gioberti drew the Cavour of the future with a
penetration and a sureness of touch which would make a reader, who
did not know the date, suppose that the words were written ten years
later. Men of great talent, he said, rarely threw aside the chance of
becoming famous; rather did they snatch it with avidity; and what
fame more splendid could now be won than that of the minister of the
Italian prince who should re-make the country? He fixed his hopes on
Cavour, because he alone understood that in human society civilisation
is everything, all the rest, without it, nothing. "He knows that
statutes, parliaments, newspapers, all the appurtenances of free
governments, even if they are of use to individuals, are miserable
shams to the commonalty if they fail to help forward social progress."
He was willing to forgive him the generous error of treating a
province as if it were a nation, when he compared it with the
pettiness of those who treated the nation as if it were a province. He
invoked some great and solemn act of _Italianità_ on his part, which
should pledge him irrevocably to the national cause. Cavour was too
little influenced by others for it to be safe to say that this was
one of the prophecies which tend to their own fulfilment; still it is
worth noticing that he read the passage and was struck by it.

Cavour had scarcely returned to Piedmont when a ministerial crisis
occurred through the rejection by the Senate of a far from stringent
Bill for permitting civil marriage, which had passed in the Chamber of
Deputies. The situation was further complicated by the state of mind
into which the king had been driven by the remonstrances of his wife
and mother, both near their end, and by the answer which he received
from Rome in reply to a direct appeal to settle matters amicably, the
Pope having said, in effect, that he was not going to help him to
legalise concubinage in his dominions. D'Azeglio, harassed on all
sides and ill through the reopening of his wound, resigned office, and
advised the king to send for Cavour. "The other one, whom you know, is
diabolically active, and fit in body and soul, and then, he enjoys
it so much!" he wrote to a friend, with the pathetic wonder of the
artist, romancist, and _grand seigneur_, who had never been able to
make out what there was to enjoy in politics. Victor Emmanuel followed
his advice, but he allowed Cavour to see that he hoped that the new
ministry would make up the quarrel with Rome. Cavour knew that only
one path could lead to peace--surrender. Though anxious for office he
declined to take it on these terms, and he recommended the king to
call Count Balbo to his counsels; but Balbo, persuaded that a ministry
only supported by the Extreme Right could not stand even for a few
weeks, in his turn suggested the recall of D'Azeglio. Here the saving
good sense of the king interposed; little as he liked Cavour he
recognised that he was the only man possible, and he charged him,
without conditions, with the formation of a ministry. D'Azeglio had
fallen on a point on which Cavour was for and not against him; his
successor desired to show that there would be no violent change of
policy, and he therefore reconstructed the Cabinet as it was before,
except for the change of head. He reserved for himself the Presidency
of the Council and the Ministry of Finance. Rattazzi, who still
occupied the Speaker's chair, was willing to wait for the present for
a seat in the Cabinet, especially when he heard that the king, who was
at first very hostile to the _Connubio_, had quite expected him to
take office.

So the _gran ministero_, as it was called, entered upon its functions:
great by reason of its chief, who infused his own life and vigour
into what was before a weak administration. Cavour was a born man of
business; he hated disorder in everything--except, indeed, dress, in
which his carelessness was proverbial. He had not the common belief
that, muddle them how you may, there will always be a providence which
looks after the affairs of the State and prevents the collapse that
would attend a private commercial enterprise conducted on the same
system. He took in hand the financial renewal of Piedmont in the
same spirit in which, when he had only just reached maturity, he
volunteered to restore his father's dilapidated fortune. It was for
this that he chose the Ministry of Finance: Piedmont, as he saw, could
never sustain a national and Italian policy abroad without having
first set its own house in order. He started with two principles:
taxation must be increased and the resources of the country must be so
developed as to enable it to pay its way without sinking into hopeless
stagnation. It was a disappointment to some to see Cavour devoting
himself with more ardour to putting on new taxes than to producing any
of those decorative schemes for hastening the millennium which are
expected from a new and ambitious minister. But, though ambitious, he
cared for the substance, power--not for the shadow, popularity.

If there had been no other reason for the compact with the moderate
liberals, the necessity for fresh taxation would have been a sufficing
one. The Extreme Right and Left proposed to meet the existing
difficulties by cutting down expenditure, but, if sound in theory,
in practice this policy would have reduced Piedmont to complete
impotence. While a part of the Left Centre voted with the extremists,
it was only by the greatest efforts that a grant of £100,000 was
obtained for the fortifications of Casale, which had been declared
by the war minister, La Marmora, to be absolutely necessary for the
defence of the State. The radical deputy Brofferio said that States
wanted no other defence than the breasts of their citizens. From the
Chamber, as then constituted, there was little hope of obtaining
the imposition of new burdens, in part designed to meet Sardinian
liabilities, but in part also to render possible the reorganisation of
the army, which was urgently required if the future was not to witness
disasters worse than those already experienced. Prince Metternich had
said that, even if Piedmont were so troublesome as to persist in her
liberal infatuation, she would have to keep quiet, at a moderate
computation, for twenty years--just the time which it took her king to
unite Italy. The two campaigns of 1848-1849 and the war indemnity had
cost about 300,000,000 frs. The annual expenditure was doubled. Added
to this, the one source of wealth, agriculture, was almost ruined by
the oidium disease which destroyed the vines, and by harvests so bad
that the like had not been seen since the celebrated scarcity which
followed the wars of Napoleon. As Cavour saved his father's property
not by burying the last talent in a safe place but by laying it out in
bold improvements, so now he did not fear to spend largely and even
lavishly, not only on the army, but also on public works. He completed
the railway system and employed what Brofferio called "a portentous
activity" in extending the roads, canals, and all the means of
communication which could stimulate industry. It must be remembered
that Piedmont was then lamentably backward; a long obscurantist
_régime_, succeeded by war and havoc, had left her destitute of all
the accessories of modern life. This was changed as if by the wand
of the magician. In his first budget, Cavour put on new taxes to the
amount of 14,000,000 frs., one being the so-called tax on patents, or
on the exercise of trades and professions, which excited much adverse
criticism. At the same time he reduced the salt tax and initiated
several free-trade measures, to be ultimately crowned by the abolition
of the corn laws. On the whole, however, his line of policy was not
such as would recommend itself to the crowd, and in October 1853 a
furious mob attacked the Palazzo Cavour, repeating the old cry that
the minister was a monopolist who robbed the poor of their bread.
Luckily the doors were barred, but next day Cavour was threatened as
he walked along the streets. Just then the Ministry of Justice fell
vacant, and it was offered to Rattazzi, who, to his credit be it
said, did not hesitate to take office at a time when the head of the
Government was the target of unscrupulous abuse, and it was even
thought that his life was in danger. Rattazzi was afterwards
transferred to the Home Ministry, which he held till the _Connubio_
broke up, more on personal than on political grounds, in 1858.

Though Cavour's alliance with Rattazzi was not eternal, it lasted till
it had served its purpose. By help of it he imposed his will on king
and country until he was strong enough to impose it by force of his
own commanding influence. He always considered the _Connubio_ one of
the wisest acts of his political life. It is not uncommon to hear
it still denounced in Italy as the origin of the political
demoralisation, the mixing up of private and public interests, the
lack of fixed principles; which later times have witnessed. If the
fact were admitted, it would not show that Cavour could have governed
in any other way. Had the country trusted him from the first it would
have been different, but the country did not trust him. Even after the
combination of the two Centres, whenever there was a general election
it was doubtful if the Government would obtain a working majority. The
accusation of corruption was frequently made against the Ministry in
general and Rattazzi in particular, since it was he who presided over
the electoral campaigns. Of corruption in the literal sense there was
probably little, but constituencies were led to believe that it would
be to their advantage to return the ministerial candidate. On one
occasion Rattazzi tried to prove that such hints did not constitute
"interference." Cavour got up in the course of the same debate and
not only acknowledged the "interference," but said that without it
constitutional government in Piedmont would collapse. His biographers
have preferred to be silent on this subject, but he would have
despised a reserve which conceals historical facts. The apathy of
one section of the electors, the fads and jealousies of another, the
feverish longing to pull down whomsoever was in power, inherited from
a great revolutionary crisis, the indefatigable propaganda of clerical
wire-pullers, all tended to the formation of parliaments so composed
as to bring government to a standstill. The result of a protracted
interruption might be the fall of the constitution itself, or it might
be civil war. Cavour took the means open to him to prevent it, and,
whether he was right or wrong, his career cannot be judged if the
difficulties with which he had to cope are kept out of sight.

Piedmont needed some years, not of rest, but of active and consecutive
labour before it could enter the lists again as armed champion of
Italian independence. The disastrous issue of the last conflicts had
been attributed to every cause except that which was most accountable
for it: a badly led and badly organised army. The "We are betrayed"
theory was caught up alike by republicans and conservatives, who
accused each other of ruining the country rather than give the victory
to the rival faction. Whatever grain of truth there was in these
taunts, the military inefficiency of the forces which Charles Albert
led across the Ticino in March 1848 remained the main reason why
Radetsky was able to get back Lombardy and Venetia for his master.
This Cavour knew, and he was anxious not to precipitate matters till
La Marmora, to whom he privately gave _carte blanche_, could say that
his work was done. He began treating Austria with more consideration
than she had received from Massimo d'Azeglio, who was a bad hand at
dissembling. Count Buol was gratified, almost grateful. But these
relatively harmonious relations did not last long. In February 1853
there was an abortive attempt at revolution in Milan, of which not one
person in a thousand knew anything till it was suppressed. It was the
premature and ill-advised explosion of a conspiracy by which Mazzini
hoped to repeat the miracle of 1848: the ejection of a strong military
power by a blast of popular fury. But miracles are not made to order,
though Mazzini never came to believe it. As a reprisal for this
disturbance, the Austrian Government, not content with executions and
bastinadoes, decreed the sequestration of the lands of those Lombard
emigrants who had become naturalised in Piedmont. Cavour charged
Austria with a breach of international law and recalled the Sardinian
minister from Vienna. It was risking war, but he knew that even
for the weakest state there are some things worse than war. It was
reversing the policy of prudence with which he had set out, but when
prudence meant cowardice, Cavour always cast it to the winds. The
outcry in all Europe against the sequestration decree deterred the
Austrian Government from treating the Sardinian protest as a _casus
belli_. Liberal public opinion everywhere approved of Cavour's course,
and in France and England increased confidence was felt in him by
those in authority. Governments like to deal with a strong man who
knows when not to fear.

Only such a man would have conceived the idea which was now taking
concrete form in Cavour's mind. This was the plan of an armed alliance
with the Western Powers on the outbreak of the war, which as early
as November 1853 well-informed persons looked upon as henceforth
inevitable. Cavour would never have been a Chauvinist, but he was not
by nature a believer in neutrality. He was constitutionally inclined
to think that in all serious contingencies to act is safer than not
to act. The world is divided between men of this mould and their
opposites. La Marmora told him that the army, which had made
incredible progress considering the state in which it was a short time
before, could place in the field a force for which no country would
have reason to blush. If not a great general, the Piedmontese Minister
of War might fairly be called a first-class organiser. For the rest,
Cavour believed that the ultimate school of any army is war. Above
all, he believed that this was the hour for a great resolve or a _gran
rifiuto_. If the House of Savoy stood still with folded arms it might
retire into the ranks of small ruling families, which leave the
rearrangement of maps to their betters. It was secretly reported to
Cavour that Napoleon III. was beginning to drop enigmatical remarks
about Italian affairs, and it was these reports that finally decided
him to strain every nerve to make his audacious design a reality.

Russia had broken off diplomatic relations with Sardinia in 1848,
and when Victor Emmanuel communicated the death of his father to the
Powers, the only one which returned no response was the empire of the
Czar. It would be absurd to adduce this lack of courtesy as an excuse
for war; still it gave a slightly better complexion to an attack which
the Russian Government was justified in calling "extraordinarily
gratuitous." Cavour had one person of great importance on his side,
the king. In January 1854 he broached the subject with the tentative
inquiry, "Does it not seem to your Majesty that we might find some way
of taking part in the war of the Western Powers with Russia?" To which
Victor Emmanuel answered simply, "If I cannot go myself I will send
my brother." But it is not too much to say that the whole country was
against him. The old Savoyard party opposed the war tooth and nail,
and from the "Little Piedmont" point of view it was perfectly right.
The radicals, headed by Brofferio, denounced it as "economically
reckless, militarily a folly, politically a crime." Most of the
Lombard emigration thought ill of it, and the heads of the army were
lukewarm or contrary; this was not the war they wanted. The Tuscan
romancist Guerrazzi wrote, with unpardonable levity, that republicans
ought to rejoice because this was the final disillusion given to
Italians by monarchy, limited or not. One republican, however, Manin,
saw in the Italian tricolor displayed with the French and English
flags in Paris the first ray of hope that had gladdened his eyes since
he left Venice, and Poerio; when he heard of the alliance in his
dungeon, "felt his chain grow lighter." It seemed as if those who had
suffered most for Italy had a clearness of vision denied to the rest.

What, if persisted in, would have been the most serious obstacle was
the opposition of Rattazzi, but he was won over to assent, if not to
approval, by Giuseppe Lanza, a new figure on the parliamentary scene,
who had lately been elected Vice-President of the Chamber. Lanza (who
was destined to be Prime Minister when the Italians went to Rome) was
then only slightly acquainted with Cavour; from being independent, his
favourable opinion carried more weight. With Rattazzi's adhesion
the majority of the Centres was secured. It was not an enthusiastic
majority, but it quieted its forebodings by the argument which was
beginning to take hold of people's minds: that Cavour must be let do
as he chose. Hardly any one liked him, but to see him stand there,
absolutely unhesitating and sure, among the politicians of Buts and
Ifs, began to generate the belief that he was a man of fate who must
be allowed to go his way.

It is easy to be wise after the event, and it may seem strange now
that the alliance with the Western Powers found so few, so very few
cordial supporters. But Cavour himself called the risks which attended
it "enormous." The great question for Sardinia was what Austria
would do. If she did nothing, the pros and cons were perhaps evenly
balanced; if she joined Russia, the pros would be strengthened; if she
joined the allies, the situation for Sardinia would be grave indeed.
The republicans were already calling the war an alliance with Austria.
Were the description verified, it was hard to see how the utmost
genius or skill could draw aught but evil from so unnatural a union.

The first invitation to Sardinia to co-operate came separately from
England, which had vetoed a monstrous proposal on the part of Austria
to occupy Alessandria, in order, in any case, to prevent Piedmont from
attacking her during the war. Lord Clarendon instructed Sir James
Hudson to represent to Cavour that Austria's fears would be set at
rest if a portion of the Sardinian army were sent to the East. The
chief English motive was really the conviction that numbers were
urgently required if the war was to succeed, and also the desire to
lessen the large numerical superiority of the French. In the first
instance Cavour replied that although he had been all along in favour
of participating in the war, his Cabinet was too much against the idea
for him to take any immediate action. But the subject was revived. An
alliance with Piedmont was popular in England, where the Government
was in an Italian mood, having been made terribly angry by the King of
Naples' prohibition of the sale of mules for transport purposes in the
East. In December 1854 Cavour was formally invited to send a corps
which would enter the English service and receive its pay from the
British Exchequer. He would rather have sent it on these terms than
not at all, but the scheme met with such unqualified condemnation from
La Marmora and General Dadormida, the Foreign Minister, that it was
set aside as not becoming to the dignity of an independent nation.
Meanwhile something had occurred which reinforced the arguments of
those who were against sending troops at all. After hedging for a
year, Austria signed a treaty couched in vague terms, but which
appeared to debar her, at any rate, from taking sides with
Russia--Italy's most flattering prospect. Napoleon III. expected
much more from it than this; he thought that Austria was too much
compromised to avoid throwing in her cause with the allies. It must be
said of Napoleon that among the men responsible for the Crimean War
he alone aimed at an object which, from a political, let alone moral
view, could justify it. He did not think that it would be enough to
obtain a few restrictions, not worth the paper on which they were
written, and the prospect of a new lease of life to Turkish despotism.
He certainly had one paltry object of his own; he wished to gratify
his subjects by military glory. He began to suspect the hollowness of
the testimony of the plebiscite; the French people did not like him,
and never would like him. A war would please the populace and the
army; it would also make him look much more like a real Napoleon.
But when he had decided to go to war, he hoped to do something worth
doing. He thought (to use his own words) "that no peace would be
satisfactory which did not resuscitate Poland." There, and nowhere
else, were the wings of the Russian eagle to be clipped. Moreover,
the entire French nation, which cared so little for Italy, would
have applauded the deliverance of Poland. On the Polish question the
ultramontane would have embraced the socialist. France was never so
united as in the sympathy which she then felt for Poland, except in
that which she now feels for Russia. But Napoleon did not think that
he could resuscitate Poland without Austrian assistance. At the close
of 1854 he made sure of getting it.

Cavour clung to his project. Probably his penetrating mind guessed
that Austria could not fight Russia, which had saved her from
destruction in 1849. There now arose a demand for some guarantee
which should give Piedmont, if she took part in the war, at least
the certainty of a moral advantage. The king remarked to the French
Ambassador that all this wrangling about conditions was folly "If we
ally ourselves promptly and frankly, we shall gain a great deal more"
Doubtless Cavour thought the same, but to satisfy the country it was
necessary to demand, if nothing else, a promise from the Western
Powers that they would put pressure on Austria to raise the
sequestrations on the property of the Lombard exiles. But the Powers,
which were courting Austria, refused to make any such promise,
on which the Foreign Minister, General Dadormida, resigned,
notwithstanding that the Lombard emigrants generously begged the
Government not to think of them. Cavour offered the Foreign Office and
the Presidency of the Council to D'Azeglio; under whom he would have
consented to serve, but D'Azeglio declined to enter the Ministry,
whilst engaging not to oppose its policy Cavour then took the Foreign
Office himself, and at eight o'clock on the evening of the same day,
January 10, 1855, the protocol of the offensive and defensive alliance
of Sardinia with France and England was, at last, signed.

Wilting of the Crimean War in after days, Louis Kossuth observed that
never did a statesman throw down a more hazardous and daring stake
than Cavour when he insisted on clenching the alliance after he had
found out that it must be done without any conditions or guarantees.
Cicero's _Partem fortuna sibi vindicat_ applies to diplomacy as well
as to war, "but the stroke was very bold and very dangerous."




CHAPTER VI

THE CRIMEAN WAR--STRUGGLE WITH THE CHURCH


The speeches made by Cavour in defence of the alliance before the two
Houses of Parliament contain the clearest exposition of his political
faith that he had yet given. They form a striking refutation of the
theory, still held by many, especially in Italy, that he was lifted
into the sphere of high political aims by a whirlwind none of his
sowing. In these speeches he is less occupied with Piedmont, the
kingdom of which he was Prime Minister, than an English statesman who
required war supplies would be with Lancashire. "I shall be asked," he
said, "how can this treaty be of use to Italy?" The treaty would help
Italy in the only way in which, in the actual conditions of Europe,
she could be helped. The experience of the last years and of the past
centuries had shown that plots and revolutions could not make Italy;
"at least," he added, "in my opinion it has shown it." What, then,
could make her? The raising of her credit. To raise Italy's credit two
things were needed: the proof that an Italian Government could combine
order with liberty, and the proof that Italians could fight. He was
certain that the laurels won by Sardinian soldiers in the East would
do more for Italy than all that had been done by those who thought to
effect her regeneration by rhetoric.

When Cavour spoke of himself in public, it was generally in a light
tone, and half in jest. Thus in the debate on the treaty, he said that
Brofferio and his friends could not be surprised at his welcoming the
English alliance when they had once done nothing but tax him with
Anglomania, and had given him the nickname of Milord Risorgimento. He
could easily have aroused enthusiasm if, instead of this banter, he
had spoken the words of passionate earnestness in which he alluded to
his part in the transaction in a letter to Mme. de Circourt. He felt,
he said, the tremendous responsibility which weighed on him, and the
dangers which might arise from the course adopted, but duty and honour
dictated it. Since it had pleased Providence that Piedmont, alone in
Italy, should be free and independent, Piedmont was bound to make use
of its freedom and independence to plead before Europe the cause of
the unhappy peninsula. This perilous task the king and the country
were resolved to persevere in to the end. Those French liberals and
doctrinaires who were now weeping over the loss of liberty in France,
after helping to stifle it in Italy, might consider his policy absurd
and romantic; he exposed himself to their censures, sure that all
generous hearts would sympathise with the attempt to call back to life
a nation which for centuries had been shut up in a horrible tomb. If
he failed, he reckoned on his friend reserving him a place among the
"eminent vanquished" who gathered round her; in any case she would
take the vent he had given to his feelings as the avowal _that all
his life was consecrated to one sole work, the emancipation of his
country_. This was not a boast uttered to bring down the plaudits of
the Senate; it was a confession which escaped from Cavour in one of
the rare moments when, even in private, he allowed himself to say
what he felt. But it speaks to posterity with a voice which silences
calumny.

After the point had been gained and the war embarked upon, the
anxieties of the minister who was solely responsible for it did not
decrease. The House of Savoy had survived Novara; one royal sacrifice
served the purpose of an ancient immolation; it propitiated fate.
But a Novara in the East would have been serious indeed. What Cavour
feared, however, was not defeat--it was inaction, of which the moral
effect would have been nearly as bad. What if the laurels he had
spoken of were never won at all? The position of the Sardinian
contingent on the first line was not secured without endless
diplomacy; Napoleon wished to keep it out of sight as a reserve corps
at Constantinople. When, with the aid of England, it was shipped for
Balaclava, there still seemed a disposition to hold it back. Cavour
wrote bitterly of the prospect of the Sardinian troops being sent by
the allies to perish of disease in the trenches while they advanced at
the pace of a yard a month. He described himself and his colleagues
as waiting with cruel impatience for tidings of the first engagement:
"Still no news from the army; it is distracting!" Meanwhile the "Reds"
and the "Blacks" were happy. Cavour did not fear the first, except,
perhaps, at Genoa; but he did fear the deeply-rooted forces of
reaction, which were only too likely to regain the ascendant if things
went wrong with the war.

At last the long-desired, almost despaired-of news arrived. On August
16 the Piedmontese fought an engagement on the Tchernaia; it was not
a great battle, but it was a success, and the men showed courage and
steadiness. It was hailed at Turin as a veritable godsend. The king,
jaded and worn out by the trials which this year had brought him,
rejoiced as sovereign and soldier at the prowess of his young troops.
The public underwent a general conversion to the war policy; every one
thought in secret he had always approved of it. The little flash of
glory called attention to the other merits of the Piedmontese soldier
besides those he displayed in the field. These merits were truly
great. The troops bore with the utmost patience the terrible scourge
of the cholera, which cost them 1200 lives. Their English allies were
never tired of admiring the good organisation and neatness of their
camp, which was laid out in huts that kept off the burning sun better
than tents, intersected with paths and gardens. The little army was
fortified by the feeling that after all it was serving no alien cause
but its own. "Never mind," said a soldier, as they were struggling in
the slough of the trenches, "of this mud Italy will be made." They all
shared the hope which the king expressed in a letter to La Marmora,
"Next year we shall have war where we had it before."

Victor Emmanuel's visit to the courts of Paris and London was not
without political significance. Cavour first intended that only
D'Azeglio should accompany him; he always put the Marquis forward
when he wished the country to appear highly respectable and
anti-revolutionary; at the last moment he decided to go himself as
well. In Paris the king was dismayed at observing that Napoleon, in
presence of Austria's inaction, was bent on making peace. Cavour had
also counted on the continuance of the war, but he found encouragement
in the fact that when he left, the Emperor told him to write
confidentially to Walewski what, in his opinion, he could do for
Piedmont and Italy. In England the king was most cordially received,
and, if he was rather embarrassed when a portion of the English
religious world hailed him as a kind of new Luther, he could not help
being struck by the real friendliness shown to him by all classes.
Cavour made a strongly favourable impression on Prince Albert, and the
Queen expressed so much sympathy with his aims that he called her
"the best friend of Piedmont in England." He carried away a curious
souvenir of his visit to Windsor. When Victor Emmanuel was made Knight
of the Garter, the Queen wished that he should know the meaning of
the oath he took; whereupon Lord Palmerston at once wrote down a
translation of the words into Italian, and handed it to the king.
When Cavour heard of this, he asked the king to give him the paper to
preserve in the Sardinian archives.

The preliminaries of the peace were signed in February 1856. It was a
great blow to Victor Emmanuel, who had felt confident that if the war
lasted long enough for Russia to be placed in real danger, Austria
would he obliged to go to her assistance. The heavy bill for war
expenditure, largely exceeding the estimate, damped people's spirits,
buoyed up for an instant by victory, and they asked once more, what
was the good of it all? Time was to answer the question; but before
showing how an issue, which even Cavour viewed with disappointment,
proved, nevertheless, fruitful of more good than the most sanguine
advocate of the war had ventured to hope for, a short account must be
given of the home politics of Piedmont in the year 1855.

"Battles long ago" never wholly lose their interest. The mere words,
"There was once a battle fought here" make the traveller stop and
think, even if he does not know by what men of what race it was
fought. But the parliamentary struggles of one generation seem passing
stale and unprofitable to the next. Yet the history of nations depends
as much on their civil as on their warlike contests. In Piedmont the
strife always turned on the same point: whether the State or the
Church should predominate. Free institutions do not settle the
question; it is most manifestly rife to-day in a free country, Canada.
In Italy itself a great clerical party is working silently but
ceaselessly, under the mask of abstention from the elections, to
recover its political power. The Sardinian Government could not
withdraw from the duel at will; the Church in Piedmont was a political
force constantly on the lookout for an opening to retake the position
it had lost. Besides the moral power derived from the support of the
peasants and of the old aristocracy, it wielded the material power of
an organised body, which was numerous and wealthy in proportion to the
numbers and wealth of the population. The annual income of the Church,
including the religious houses, was nearly £700,000 a year. There were
23,000 ecclesiastics, or 1 monk to every 670 inhabitants, 1 nun to
every 1695, 1 priest to every 214. In spite of the vast resources of
the Church, the parish priest in 2540 villages received a stipend
of less than £20 per year. Not only radicals but many moderate
politicians were of opinion that the great number of convents of the
contemplative orders formed an actual evil from the fact of
their encouraging able-bodied idleness, and the withdrawal of so
considerable a fraction of the population from the work and duties of
citizenship. In the autumn of 1854, before the Crimean War was thought
of, Rattazzi framed a bill by which the corporations that took no part
in public instruction, preaching, or nursing the sick, were abolished.
Since the last crisis on the civil marriage bill, which wrecked
D'Azeglio's ministry, Cavour, who all his life was not theoretically
opposed to coming to an understanding with Rome, had made several
advances to the Vatican, but with no effect: Rome refused any
modification of the Concordat or any reduction of the privileges
possessed by the clergy in the kingdom of Sardinia. On the failure
of these negotiations, Victor Emmanuel despatched three high
ecclesiastics on a private mission to the Pope to see if the quarrel
could be made up. This mission, which might have seriously compromised
the king, was not counselled by Cavour, who put a violent end to it
when he authorised Rattazzi to bring in the bill for the suppression
of religious houses. Victor Emmanuel was deeply mortified, and the
Pope protested against this new "horrible and incredible assault of
the subalpine Government." Just at the time that the measure was
discussed in Parliament, the king lost his mother, his wife, his
infant child, and his brother, a series of misfortunes in which the
Church saw "the finger of God." As the two queens and the Duke of
Genoa were devoted Catholics, their last hours were rendered miserable
by the impending sacrilegious act. It is not to be wondered if the
king was almost driven out of his mind.

After the lugubrious interruption of the royal funerals, the debate on
the religious corporations was resumed with new vigour. Much the
most effective speeches on either side were those delivered by the
combatants of the two extremes, Brofferio and Count Solaro de la
Margherita. Brofferio, who regarded all convents as a specific evil,
had proposed their indiscriminate abolition in 1848, directly after
the promulgation of the Statute. Cavour, he said, had then defended
them. Was he therefore, mindful of their old warfare, to vote against
this Bill in order to place difficulties in the way of the Ministry?
Far from it. If the Government were willing to abolish all the
convents, so much the better; if 490, he would vote for that; if 245,
he was ready to approve; if 100, yes; if 10, he would vote for 10; if
one convent, he agreed; if one monk, his vote would be given for the
abolition of one monk. He would not imitate those speakers who had
attempted to conjure up a canonical or theological defence of the
Bill. The Pope was probably a better theologian than he; but he denied
that the Church had any prescriptive rights at all: all her privileges
and property being held on sufferance of the State, which could
withdraw its toleration when it chose. Illustrious Italians, from
Dante downwards, denounced the love of power and money of the Church
as the bane of Italy. Had not Machiavelli said, "If Italy has fallen
a prey not only to powerful barbarians but to whatsoever attack, we
Italians are indebted for it to the Church and to nothing else"?
Respect for the intentions of the pious founder was a good thing in
its way (Brofferio had the sense to see that this was the strongest
argument of the opposite party), yet, logically pursued, it would have
obliged us to this day to preserve the temple of Delphi with a full
chapter of priests. Some one might have got up and said, "A very
interesting result"; but Neo-Hellenism did not grow in the Sardinian
Chamber of Deputies. Brofferio censured the exemption of the teaching
and preaching orders--according to him, the most mischievous of all.
He blamed the Ministry for excusing the measure on financial grounds.
Either it was just or it was unjust. If just, it needed no excuse;
if unjust, no excuse could justify it. There was, he said, no use in
trying to make the Bill appear moderate in the hopes that it would be
borne more patiently by the body against which it was aimed. The Court
of Rome knew no more or less. War to the knife or refusal to kiss the
Pope's toe: it was all one.

As the stoutest champion of the Bill was the Béranger of Piedmont,
with his rough and ready eloquence, so its most formidable critic was
the old apostle of thrones and altars, who would have taken Philip II.
as a model king, and Torquemada as an ideal statesman. His
onslaught was far stronger than the strictures of less out-and-out
reactionaries. It was easy, for instance, to accuse of weakness the
amiable sentimentality of the Marquis Gustavo Cavour, who evoked Padre
Cristoforo from Manzoni's _Promessi Sposi_ to plead for his fellow
friars; but there was no destroying the force, so far as it went, of
Count Solaro's question, Were they Catholics, or were they not? To
endorse a policy not approved by the Church was to cease, _ipso
facto_, to be a Catholic. The reasoning might not be true, but it was
clear. Charles Albert's old minister drew a beautiful picture of the
country in the good old times before the Statute. Then the people did
not lack bread. Life and property and the good name of citizens were
safeguarded. The finances were not exhausted; the taxes were not
excessive; the revenue was not diminishing; treaties were observed;
Piedmont possessed that consideration of foreign courts which a wise
government can always command, even without the prestige of force:--a
picture drawn in a fine artistic free-hand, not slavishly subservient
to fact; but as to the taxes, at least, its correctness was not to be
gainsaid. Seen from this point of view, the progress of all modern
States means retrogression, a paradox which has passed now from the
friends of the old order, few of whom have still the courage to
sustain it, to the socialists, the sum of whose contentions it exactly
formulates. Count Solaro enlarged on the dreadful evils that would
result from the Bill were it to become law, not to the religious
corporations, which a wiser generation and renewed endowments would
restore to more than their pristine prosperity, but to the country
which suffered the perpetration of a sin so enormous that words were
powerless to describe it.

After the war dances of Brofferio and Solaro de la Margherita,
Cavour made a temperate speech, in which he said that he agreed with
Brofferio in placing moral expediency above a question of finance, but
that if this were granted, the Government could not be indifferent,
in the present state of the finances, to a saving of nearly a million
francs a year (it being proposed to defray out of the confiscated
ecclesiastical property a grant to that amount which the State paid to
the poorer clergy). He defended the expropriation of a convent called
Santa Croce to meet the need of a hospital for the military cholera
patients. Passing on to larger considerations, he recognised the great
services rendered by religious orders in past times, when Europe was
emerging from barbarism, and was still a prey to the violence and
ignorance of feudal society. Had the religious communities not met
a want, they would not have taken root. Civilisation, literature,
agriculture, and above all the poor, neglected and oppressed by the
secular power, owed them an immense debt. But coming down to the
present day, Cavour argued that the original part played by monks and
friars was now filled, and of necessity more efficaciously filled, by
laymen. Their presence in superabundant numbers in the modern State
was an anachronism. It was only needful to compare the countries where
they abounded in number and in influence, as in Spain and the kingdom
of Naples, with England, Prussia, or France, to see whether it was
possible to allege that they tended to enlightenment and prosperity.

The Bill was passed in the Chamber of Deputies on March 2, 1855,
by 170 ayes against 36 noes; the majority, so much larger than the
Government could usually command, showed that it rested on undoubted
popular support. It was then sent up to the Senate, but while it was
being discussed there, an incident occurred which nearly caused a
political convulsion. The Archbishop of Novara and the Bishop of
Mondovi wrote to the king promising that if the Bill were withdrawn,
the Church in Piedmont would make up the sum of 92,841,230 frs., which
the Government expected to gain by the suppressions. The king was
delighted with the proposal, not perceiving the hopelessness of
getting it approved by the Chamber of Deputies, which had already
passed the measure, and the impossibility of settling the matter "out
of court" without parliamentary sanction. He invited Cavour to accede,
and on his refusal, he accepted the resignation of the Ministry.
Personally the king had always a certain sense of relief in parting
with Cavour. He thought now that he could get on without him, but he
was to be undeceived. While he was endeavouring to find some one to
undertake the formation of a new cabinet, the country became agitated
as it had not been since the stormy year of revolution. Angry crowds
gathered in Piazza Castello, within a few yards of the royal palace.
"One of these days," Victor Emmanuel said impatiently to his trusted
valet, Cinzano, "I'll make an end of these demonstrations," to which
the descendant of Gil Blas is reported to have replied as he looked
out of window: "And if they made an end of Us?" The whole population
woke up to the fact that surrender on this point involved surrender
along all the line. The king, however, to whom the compromise appeared
in the light of peace with the dead and with the living, with the
Superga and with the Vatican, was very unwilling to yield. At the
same time no one could be found to form a ministry. In this dangerous
crisis, Massimo d'Azeglio wrote a letter to his sovereign which is
believed to have been what convinced him. Recalling the Spanish royal
personage whom courtiers let burn to death sooner than deviate from
the motto, _ne touchez pas la Reine_, D'Azeglio protested that if he
was to risk his head, or totally to lose the king's favour, he would
think himself the vilest of mankind if he did not write the words
which he had not been permitted to speak. As an old and faithful
servant, who had never thought but of his king's welfare and the good
of the country, he conjured him with tears in his eyes, and kneeling
at his feet, to go no further on the path he was entering. A monkish
intrigue had succeeded in breaking up the work of his reign, agitating
the country, shaking the constitution and obscuring the royal name for
good faith. There was not a moment to lose; similar intrigues had led
the House of Bourbon and the House of Stuart to their destruction. Let
the king take heed while there was time! It was long before Victor
Emmanuel quite forgave his old friend, but the warning voice was not
raised in vain.

Cavour was recalled. The Bill was presented again to the Senate with
some slight modifications. One religious order was spared by Rattazzi,
rather against the will of Cavour, who described it as "absolutely
useless," because the king particularly wished to save it, the nuns
having been favourites of his mother. To Cavour, Victor Emmanuel's
resistance had seemed simply a fit of superstitious folly; he did not
sufficiently realise how distasteful the whole affair must be to a man
like the king, who said to General Durando when he was starting
for the Crimea, "You are fortunate, General, in going to fight the
Russians, while I stay here to fight monks and nuns." In its amended
form the Bill passed on May 29. Cavour had triumphed completely, but
he came out of the struggle physically and mentally exhausted; "a
struggle," he wrote to his Geneva friends, "carried on in Parliament,
in the drawing-rooms, at the court as in the street, and rendered
more painful by a crowd of distressing events." As usual he sought
refreshment in the fields of Leri, and when, after a brief rest, he
returned to Turin, the furious passions which had surged round this
domestic duel were beginning to cool as the eyes of the nation became
more and more fixed on the conflict in the East and its significance
to Italy.

We can proceed now with the story of Cavour's work in the memorable
year which opened so gloomily with a truce that appeared to leave
_felix Austria_ mistress of the situation. Without firing a shot, that
Power could consider herself the chief gainer by the war. Napoleon
III., anxious for peace, welcomed her mediation, and in England,
though peace was unpopular, and Austrian selfishness during the war
had not been admired, Lord Palmerston was handicapped by the idea
which just then occupied his mind, that Austria chiefly stood in the
way of what, as an Englishman, he most feared in European politics,
a Franco-Russian alliance. He divined the probability, almost the
inevitability, of such an alliance at a date when most persons would
have thought it an absurd fiction. Thus, in January 1856, both the
French and English Governments were in a phase of opinion which
promised nothing to Italian aspirations. The question was, Would it be
possible for one capable brain to bend them to its purposes'? In the
first instance, Cavour believed that it would not. He did not mean to
represent his country at the Congress of Paris, nor did he hope that
any good would come out of it for Italy. He wished, however, that
Sardinia should figure, if not to her advantage, at any rate with
dignity and decorum, and he turned, as he was wont to do when he
wanted a "perfect knight," to the _rivale_, Massimo d'Azeglio. Both
men had the little private joke of calling one another by this name in
their familiar letters, which shows how free they were from any real
jealousy. D'Azeglio was ready to accept what had the prospect of being
a most thankless office, but on one condition--that the Sardinian
plenipotentiary should be received on an equality with the
representatives of the great Powers. Cavour knew that this condition
had been explicitly refused; to please Austria, France and England
declared that Sardinia would only be invited to share in those
sittings of the Congress which affected her interests. Cavour did not
let D'Azeglio know of the refusal; it was a case of the "tortuous ways
of Count Cavour," of which the Prince Consort complained some years
later. Cavour was scrupulous about the principles which he considered
vital, but in dealing with men, and especially in dealing with his old
colleague, he made more mental reservations than a severe moralist
would allow. In the present instance the deception failed, for
D'Azeglio, seized at the last moments with suspicions, insisted on
seeing the diplomatic notes which had been exchanged relative to the
Congress. In reading these, he discovered the true state of affairs,
and in a violent fit of anger he refused to go. This incident was the
sole cause of the departure of Cavour himself in the place of his
indignant nominee. So are rough-hewn ends shaped.

In January, just before the armistice, Cavour had sent the memorandum
on what could be done by the Emperor for Italy, which Napoleon
authorized him to write when he was in Paris. The first draft of the
document was written by D'Azeglio, in whose literary style Cavour
felt more faith than in his own; but this was not used. It was
"magnificent," Cavour said, but "too diffuse and long." With the
Emperor it was needful to put everything in the most concrete form,
and to take a general view of all the hypotheses, except war with
Austria, which, "for the present," did not enter into his ideas.
D'Azeglio was offended at the rejection of his work. He wrote
complainingly, "I may be called a fool about everything else, Amen;
but about Italy, no!" The memorandum actually sent was short and
moderate in tone, the chief point recommended being the evacuation of
Bologna by the Austrians. It has been sometimes quoted in order to
convict Cavour, at this period, of having held poor and narrow views
of the future of Italy. But a man who is mounting a stair does not put
his foot on the highest step first. At this stage in his political
life most of Cavour's biographers pause to discuss the often-put
question, Was he already aiming at Italian unity? Perhaps the best
answer is, that really it does not matter. To be very anxious to prove
the affirmative is to misunderstand the grounds on which we may call
Cavour one of the greatest of statesmen. Those grounds are not what
he hoped to do, but what he did. He was not a Prometheus chained to
a rock, who hopes till hope creates the thing it contemplates.
Constitutionally he was easily discouraged. In the abstract he rather
exaggerated difficulties than minimised them; but in the face of any
present obstacle an invincible confidence came over him in his power
to surmount it. As he once wrote of himself--moderate in opinion,
he was favourable, rather than not, to extreme and audacious means.
However long it may have been before the union of all parts of Italy
seemed to Cavour a goal within the range of practical politics (that
he always thought it a desirable goal there is not the smallest
doubt), there was one, the Tiresias of the old order, who said boldly
to the Prime Minister of Piedmont at this very juncture: You are
steering straight to Italian unity. Solaro de la Margherita, who
once declared that "in speaking of kings all who had not sold their
consciences were seized with religious terror," saw what he would not
see, more clearly than it was seen by those who would have died to
make it true. Standing on the brink of the past, the old statesman
warned back the future. In the debate on the loan for thirty million
francs required to meet the excess in war expenditure (January 14),
Count Solaro said: "The object, Italian unity, is not hidden in the
mysteries of the Cabinet; it glimmers out, clear as the light of day,
from the concatenation of so many circumstances that I lift the veil
of no arcanum in speaking of it; and even if I did, it would be my
duty to lift it and warn all concerned of the unwisdom and impropriety
of those aspirations." Deny it who would, he continued, unity was
what was aimed at--what was laboured for with indefatigable activity.
Italian unity! How could it sound to the other Italian princes? What
was its real meaning for the Pope? The unity of Italy could only be
achieved either by submitting the whole peninsula to the Roman Pontiff
or by depriving him of the temporal power. And the speaker ended by
prophesying, his only prophecy which failed, that this shocking event
would not happen in the present century, whatever God might permit in
the next.

An unwary minister would have taken up the ball and thrown it back.
Cavour's presence of mind prompted him to leave it where it lay. He
did not say, "No, we are not working for Italian unity; no, we do
not wish to overthrow the Pope." He answered that in speaking of
the future of Italy it was impossible for a Piedmontese minister to
entirely separate his desires, his sympathies, from what he considered
his political duty: hence there was no more slippery ground than that
on which, with consummate art, the Deputy Solaro de la Margherita
had tried to draw him. But, he said, he would avail himself of the
privilege generally conceded to the ministers of a constitutional
government when questions were still pending--to defer his reply till
the case was closed (_a guerra finita_).




CHAPTER VII

THE CONGRESS OF PARIS


With the foreboding that this would be the last act of his political
life, Cavour started on the mission which he had almost no choice
but to assume, in spite of his extreme repugnance for the _rôle_ of
diplomatist. A few days after his arrival in Paris he was informed
that the Emperor, in concert with England, conceded the point as to
placing the representative of Sardinia on the same footing as the
others. Though it does not seem to have struck Cavour, the sudden
change of intention was evidently an involuntary tribute to himself:
how could such a man be treated as an inferior? Only the form was
won; the substance remained in doubt. Lord Clarendon hinted to the
Piedmontese plenipotentiary that he had "too much tact" to mix in
discussions which did not concern him. But Cavour was not discouraged.
With his usual quick rebound he was soon thoroughly braced up to the
work before him. As he began to see his way, he was rather spurred
on than disconcerted by the chorus of dismal predictions which the
Congress and his own part in it evoked at home. Almost every notable
man in Piedmont contributed his quota of melancholy vaticination, in
which the note, "I told you so!" was already audible. Who could plead
Italy's cause in a congress in which Austria had a voice? Was there
ever such midsummer madness? "But we knew how it would be from the
first."

Cavour had said that he hated playing at diplomacy; but some of his
smaller, as well as larger gifts, marked him out as a successful
diplomatist. He was watchful for little advantages. All who could help
the cause were enlisted in its service. Thus he made a convert of a
fair Countess, to whose charms Napoleon III was supposed not to be
insensible. Paris was full of notabilities whom he sought to turn
into useful allies. In a letter to the Marquis Emanuel d'Azeglio (the
Sardinian Minister in London) he tells how he even "made up" to Lady
Holland's dog with such success that he got it to put its large paws
on his new coat! When the Marchioness of Ely arrived to be present on
the part of the Queen at the birth of the Prince Imperial, Cavour,
knowing her to be the Queen's intimate correspondent, lost no time in
paying his court to her; but in this instance an acquaintance begun
from political motives ripened into real friendship on both sides. A
point which is worth observing is that, as minister, no one ever made
less use of what may he called the influence of society than Cavour.
He never tried to make himself agreeable at Turin, least of all to the
king. For a long time he was considered haughty by those who did not
know him, and arbitrary by those who did. But abroad he underwent a
change which probably came about from his revealing not less but more
of his natural self. "He has that petulance," Massimo d'Azeglio said,
"which is exactly what they like in Paris." Abroad he could give this
quality freer play than in Italy, where vivacity offends in a serious
man. He charmed even those who did not share his opinions. At a dinner
given by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris to all the members of the
Congress, he sat next to the Abbé Darboy, one day to succeed to the
see and meet a martyr's death in the Commune. The Abbé never forgot
his neighbour of that evening, and in 1870, at Rome during the
Oecumenical Council, when some one mentioned Cavour's name, he
exclaimed, throwing up his hands, "Ah, that was a man in a thousand!
He had not the slightest sentiment of hate in his heart."

In the two months which Cavour spent in Paris he perceived very
clearly that Walewski and the other French ministers would have to be
reckoned more as opponents than friends in the future development of
affairs. He found, however, two men who could be trusted to continue
his work by incessantly pushing Napoleon III. in an Italian direction;
one was Prince Napoleon, the other, Dr. Conneau, a person entirely in
the Imperial confidence. Henceforth Dr. Conneau was the secret, and
for a long time quite unsuspected, intermediary between Cavour and the
Emperor. The idea of establishing this channel of communication first
occurred to Count Arese, whose own influence at the Tuileries, though
exercised with prudent reserve, was of no slight importance. This
Milanese nobleman personified, as it were all the proud hatred of
the Lombard aristocracy for an alien yoke. The truest and most
disinterested friend of Queen Hortense, Arese remained faithfully
attached to her son in good and evil fortune. He would never turn the
friendship to account for himself. When Napoleon offered to ask as a
personal favour for the removal of the sequestration on his family
property, he answered that he preferred to take his chance with the
rest. He won the lasting regard of the Empress, though she knew that
he influenced Napoleon in a sense contrary to her own political
sympathies. The visits of this high-minded gentleman and devoted
friend were as welcome at a court crowded with self-seekers and
charlatans as they were to be later in the solitude of Chislehurst.
Arese was in Paris during the Congress, having been chosen by the
king, at Cavour's urgent request, to carry his congratulations to the
Emperor on the birth of the Prince Imperial.

At the earlier sittings of the Congress, Cavour kept in the
background; his instinct as a man of the world, and that mixture of
astuteness and simplicity which he shared with many of his countrymen
(even those of no education), guided him in filling a difficult and,
in some respects, an embarrassing position. He spoke, when he did
speak, in as brief terms as could serve to express his opinion.
But this modest attitude only threw into relief his inalienable
superiority. He cast about the shadow of future greatness. The
representative of the second-rate Power, who sat there only by favour,
was to make so much more history than any of his colleagues! Curiously
enough the only one of the plenipotentiaries who had a prior
acquaintance with Cavour was the Austrian, Count Buol, who was
formerly ambassador at Turin. In old days, before 1848, he had played
whist with him. "I know M. de Cavour," he said; "I am afraid he will
give us _de fil à retordre_." Cavour carefully avoided, however,
unnecessary friction. Loyal to both the allies, he managed to steer
between their not always consonant aims while preserving his own
independence, by taking what seemed, on the whole, the most liberal
side in debated questions. With Count Buol he maintained courteous
if formal relations, and he soon made a thorough conquest of Count
Orloff, who did not begin by being prepossessed in favour of the
minister who alone had caused the Sardinian attack on Russia, but who
ended on far better terms with him than with his Austrian colleague,
of whom he said to Cavour in a voice meant to be heard, "Count Buol
talks exactly as if Austria had taken Sebastopol!"

With regard to Cavour's real business, the fate of Italy, he was
obliged to proceed with a restraint which few men would have had the
self-control to observe. This was what had been predicted; how, in
fact, putting aside Austria, could an Italian patriot speak freely
of nationality, of alien dominion, of the rights of peoples, in an
assembly of old diplomatists, conservative by the nature of their
profession and religiously in awe of treaties by the responsibility
of their office? It was only just before the signature of peace that
Cavour cautiously launched his bolt in the shape of a note on the
situation of affairs in Italy, addressed to the English and French
plenipotentiaries. It was conceived on the same lines as the letter
to Walewski: the Austrian occupation of the Roman Legations was again
made a sort of test question, to which particular weight was attached.
One reason why Cavour dwelt so much on this point was that the
occupation could be assailed on legal grounds, leaving nationality
alone. As, moreover, it was admitted that the Papal Government would
fall in Romagna were the Austrians withdrawn, the principle of the
destruction of the temporal power of the Pope would be granted
from the moment that their departure was declared expedient. While
D'Azeglio thought that the separation of Romagna from the States of
the Church would be "positively mischievous," Cavour looked upon it in
the light of the first step to far greater changes. Many other schemes
were floating in his brain for which he worked feverishly in private,
though he did not venture to support them officially. The object
nearest his heart was the union or rather reunion of Parma and
Modena with Piedmont, to which those duchies had annexed themselves
spontaneously in 1848. In order to get rid of the Duke of Modena and
Duchess of Parma with the consent of Europe, Cavour was desperately
anxious to find them--other situations. Every throne that was or could
be made vacant was reviewed in turn; Greece, Wallachia, and Moldavia,
anywhere out of Italy would do; the Duchess, not a very youthful
widow, was to marry this or that prince to obligingly facilitate
matters:--abortive projects, which seem absurd now, but Cavour was
willing to try everything to gain anything. In weaving these plans
Cavour employed the energy of which Prince Napoleon complained that he
did not show enough in the Congress, though to have shown more would
have led to a rebuff, or, perhaps, to enforced retirement. Still there
was one point which, in the Congress, as out of it, he never treated
with moderation: this was the sequestration of Lombard estates. When
Count Buol spoke of an amnesty including _nearly_ all cases, he
replied that he would not renew diplomatic relations with Vienna
while one exception remained. In an audience with the Emperor, after
Walewski had ingeniously tried to excuse Austria for exercising her
"rights" over her ex-subjects, Cavour burst out with the declaration
that if he had 150,000 men at his disposal he would make it a _casus
belli_ with Austria that very day.

Peace was signed on March 30. A supplementary sitting was held on
April 8, when the President, Count Walewski, by express order of
the Emperor, and to the astonishment of all present, proposed for
discussion the French and Austrian occupations of the Roman States
and the conduct of the king of Naples (his own favourite monarch) as
likely to provoke grave complications and to compromise the peace of
Europe. This was a victory for Cavour, as it was the direct result
of his "note," but he was afraid that the discussion of the Roman
question would be kept within the narrowest limits in consequence of
its affecting France as well as Austria. Walewski wished so to limit
it; he was embarrassed by the analogy of the French in Rome, and by
the fear of saying something unflattering of the Pope. But Napoleon
would not have risked the discussion at all had he shared his
minister's sensitiveness. The truth was, that he was always looking
out for an excuse which would serve with the clerical party in
France for recalling his troops from Rome. He was thinking then of
withdrawing them so as to oblige Austria to withdraw her forces from
the Legations. It does not appear that Cavour guessed this. In his own
speech he glided over the presence of the French, in Rome as lightly
as he could, merely saying that his Government "desired" the complete
evacuation of the Roman States; but his reserve was not imitated by
Lord Clarendon, nor could Napoleon have expected that it would
be. When some one asked Lord Palmerston for a definition of the
difference between "occupation" and "business," he answered on the
spur of the moment--"There is a French occupation of Rome, but they
have no business there;" and this witticism correctly represented
English opinion on the subject. It was natural, therefore, that the
British plenipotentiary should make no distinction between the French
in Rome and the Austrians at Bologna: he denounced both occupations as
equally to be condemned and equally calculated to disturb the
balance of power, but at the root of the matter was the abominable
misgovernment, which made it impossible to leave the Pope to his
subjects without fear of revolution. The papal administration was the
opprobrium of Europe. As to the king of Naples, if he did not soon
mend his ways and listen to the advice of the Powers, it would become
their duty to enforce it by arguments of a kind which he could not
refuse to obey. An extraordinary sensation was created by the speech
of which this is a bald summary; it might have been spoken, Cavour
said, "by an Italian radical," and the vehemence with which it was
delivered doubled its effect. Lord Clarendon, who, at the beginning of
the Congress, was nervous as to what Cavour might do, had been worked
up to such a pitch of indignation by the private conversations of his
outwardly discreet colleague that he himself threw diplomatic reserve
to the winds. Walewski, dreadfully uncomfortable about the Pope, tried
to bring the discussion back within politer bounds; Buol was stiffly
indignant; Orloff, indifferent about the Pope, was on tenter-hooks as
to Russia's friend, the king of Naples; the Prussian plenipotentiary
said that he had no instructions; the Grand Vizier was the only person
who remained quite calm. Cavour's concluding speech was dignified and
prudent; his real comment on the proceedings was the remark which he
made to every one after the sitting was over: "You see there is only
one solution--the cannon!"

On April 11 he called on Lord Clarendon with the intention of driving
home this inference. Two things, he said, resulted from what had
passed: firstly, that Austria was resolved to make no concession;
secondly, that Italy had nothing to expect from diplomacy. This being
so, the position of Sardinia became extremely difficult: either she
must make it up with the Pope and with Austria, or she must prepare,
with prudence, for war with Austria. In the first alternative he
should retire, to make place for the retrogrades; in the second he
wished to be sure that his views were not in opposition to those of
"our best ally," England. Lord Clarendon "furiously caressed his
chin," but he seemed by no means surprised "You are perfectly right,"
he said, "only it must not be talked about." Cavour then said that war
did not alarm him, and, when once begun, they were determined that
it should be to the knife (using the English phrase); he added that,
however short a time it lasted, England would be obliged to help them.
Lord Clarendon, taking his hand from his chin, replied, "Certainly,
with all our hearts."

When, after Cavour's death, the text of this conversation was printed,
Lord Clarendon denied in the House of Lords having ever encouraged
Piedmont to go to war with Austria. Nevertheless, it is impossible
that Cavour, who wrote his account of the interview directly after it
occurred, could have been mistaken about the words which may well have
escaped from the memory of the speaker in an interval of six years.
With regard to the sense, the sequel proved that Lord Clarendon did
not attach the official value to what he said which, for a moment,
Cavour hoped to find in it. Lord Clarendon's speech before the
Congress gives evidence of a state of mind wrought to the utmost
excitement by the tale of Italy's sufferings, and it is not surprising
if, speaking as a private individual, he used still stronger
expressions of sympathy. Nor is it surprising that Cavour attributed
more weight to these expressions than they merited. Up till now, he
had never counted on more than moral support from England; he admitted
to himself that the English alliance, which he would have infinitely
preferred to any other, was a dream. But the thought now flashed on
him that it might become a reality. He decided to pay a short visit
to England, which was useful, because it dispelled illusions, always
dangerous in politics. In the damp air of the Thames, Lord Clarendon
seemed no longer the same enthusiast, and Lord Palmerston pleaded the
excuse of a domestic affliction for seeing very little of Cavour. The
Queen was kind as ever, but the momentary hope conceived in Paris
vanished. One after-consequence of this visit was Lord Lyndhurst's
motion, which nearly caused an estrangement between the British and
Sardinian Governments. Cavour had taken too literally the assurance
that on the subject of Italy there was no division of parties. The
warmly Italian speech of the veteran conservative statesman which had
been inspired by him was not meant to embarrass the ministry, but
that was its effect, and it was natural that they should feel some
resentment. Fortunately the cloud soon passed away, and if Cavour
imagined to gain anything from flirtations with the Tory party he
was undeceived by the violently pro-Austrian speech delivered by Mr.
Disraeli in July. The sincere goodwill of individuals such as Lord
Lyndhurst and Lord Stanhope (who invented the phrase "Italy for
the Italians," so often repeated later) did not represent the then
prevailing sentiment of the party as a whole.

Cavour returned to Turin without bringing, as Massimo d'Azeglio
expressed it, "even the smallest duchy in his pocket"; yet satisfied
with his work, for he rightly judged that, though there was no
material gain, the moral victory was complete. The recalcitration of
Austria, which had reached the point of threatening war if Parma were
joined to Piedmont, contained the germs of her dissolution as an
Italian power. The temporal power of the Pope had been called in
question for the first time, not in the lodge of a secret society, but
in the council chamber of Europe. Beaten on the lower plane, Cavour
had won on the higher; checked as a Piedmontese, he was triumphant
as an Italian. In spite of the approval voted by both Houses of
Parliament, some shade of disappointment existed in Piedmont, but
throughout Italy there was exultation. The Tuscan patriots sent the
statesman a bust of himself, with the happily chosen inscription:
"Colui che la difese a viso aperto."[1]

[Footnote 1: "He who defended her with open face" (Dante).]

The position of Piedmont after the Congress of Paris was one to which
it would be difficult to find a parallel. States are commonly at peace
or at war; if at peace, even where there are smouldering enmities, an
appearance is kept up of mutual toleration. But in Piedmont the king,
government, and people were already morally at war with Austria. When
Cavour said in the Chamber that the two months during which he sat
side by side with the Austrian plenipotentiaries had left in his
mind no personal animus against them, as he was glad to admit their
generally courteous conduct, but the most intimate conviction that
any understanding between the two countries was unattainable, he
was certainly aware of the grave significance of his words. Great
solutions were not the work of the pen, and diplomacy was powerless
to change the fate of peoples: these were the conclusions which he
brought away from Congress. Every one knew that they meant war. Except
for the order for marching, the truce imposed by Novara was broken.
Those who had been edified by Cavour's cautious language in Paris
stood aghast. It was well enough that Piedmont should protest in a
calm, academic way, but protest was now abandoned for defiance. The
change was the more unwelcome, because both in France and England the
pendulum of the clock was swinging towards Austria. Napoleon disliked
to commit himself to any policy, and after seeming to adopt one side
he invariably swayed to the other. There was not the same intentional
inconsistency in England, but the fact that Austria was undergoing
a detachment from Russia improved her relations with England. Lord
Palmerston suspected Cavour of being too friendly with Russia. In
addition to this, there was a real fear in England lest Piedmont
should pay dearly for what was considered its rashness. The British
Government put the question to Cavour, whether it would not be
better to disarm the opposition of Austria by depriving her of every
plausible reason for combating the policy of Piedmont? He replied
that only Count Solaro de la Margherita and his friends could live on
amicable terms with the oppressors of Italy; England was at liberty to
renew her old alliance with Austria if she chose, but upon that
ground he could not follow her; Lord Palmerston might end where Lord
Castlereagh began, but they would remain faithful to their principles
whatever happened.

Two causes tended to prolong a coldness that was new in the
intercourse between England and Piedmont. One was the frontier
question of Bolgrad, in which, however, Cavour finally acted as
mediator, his suggestion being accepted both by the English and
the Russian Governments. The other was the _Cagliari_ affair: the
_Cagliari_, a Sardinian merchant ship, which carried the ill-fated
expedition of Pisacane to Sapri, was captured by the Neapolitan
Government, and the crew, two of whom were English, were taken in
chains to Sal

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