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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 grew every day more distrustful of Napoleon, and more regretful that the only man whom he believed able to cope with him was out of office. "They talk a great deal in Paris of Cavour's intrigues," he wrote to Lord Cowley. "This seems to me unjust.
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.
The kind of ship I have in mind costs at least two hundred thousand credits." "I know that. But I've had a look at Cavour's diary, too. It was only a matter of time before you decided to follow the old duck to Venus, and I'm too smart to think that there's any point in putting up a battle. Let me know when you've got your ship picked out and I'll sit down and write the check."
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.
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.
On the fourth, written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: The Journal of James Hudson Cavour. He had plenty of time, during the six-day return journey, to read and re-read Cavour's final words and to make photographic copies of the withered old pages.
If moral fusion is still incomplete, political fusion has, at least, advanced so far that the present institutions and the nation must stand or fall together. The monarchy was made for the country, not the country for the monarchy. An acute Frenchman remarked during the Franco-German War, that Prince Bismarck had taken Cavour's conception without what made it really great liberty.
The period from the meeting with the Emperor of the French to the outbreak of the war was, in the opinion of the present writer, the greatest period in Cavour's life. Patience, temper, forethought, resource, resolution every quality of a great statesman he exhibited in turn, and above all the supreme gift of making no mistakes. He did not trust in chance or in fate; he trusted entirely in himself.
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.
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