No," said Cavour, "it is the statesmen,
the diplomatists, the writers of England, who are responsible for the
troubled situation of Italy; for is it not they who have worked for years
to kindle political passion in our peninsula, and is it not England that
has encouraged Sardinia to oppose the propaganda of moral influences to
the illegitimate predominance of Austria in Italy?" To Mr. Gladstone, who
had seen the Austrian forces in Venetia and in Lombardy, he said, "You
behold for yourself, that it is Austria who menaces us; here we are
tranquil; the country is calm; we will do our duty; England is wrong in
identifying peace with the continuance of Austrian domination." Two or
three days later the Piedmontese minister made one of those momentous
visits to Paris that forced a will less steadfast than his own.

The French Emperor in his dealings with Cavour had entangled himself, in
Mr. Gladstone's phrase, with "a stronger and better informed intellect
than his own." "Two men," said Guizot, "at this moment divide the
attention of Europe, the Emperor Napoleon and Count Cavour. The match has
begun. I back Count Cavour." The game was long and subtly played. It was
difficult for the ruler who had risen to power by bloodstained usurpation
and the perfidious ruin of a constitution, to keep in step with a
statesman, the inspiring purpose of whose life was the deliverance of his
country by the magic of freedom. Yet Napoleon was an organ of European
revolution in a double sense. He proclaimed the doctrine of nationality,
and paid decorous homage to the principle of appeal to the popular voice.
In time England appeared upon the scene, and by his flexible management of
the two western powers, England and France, Cavour executed the most
striking political transformation in the history of contemporary Europe.
It brought, however, as Mr. Gladstone speedily found, much trouble into
the relations of the two western powers with one another.

The overthrow of the Derby government and the accession of the whigs
exactly coincided in time with the struggle between Austria and the
Franco-Sardinian allies on the bloody fields of Magenta and Solferino. A
few days after Mr. Gladstone took office, the French and Austrian emperors
and King Victor Emmanuel signed those preliminaries of Villafranca (July
11, 1859), which summarily ended an inconclusive war by the union of
Lombardy to the Piedmontese kingdom, and the proposed erection of an
Italian fe