ned, authoritative way, leaving his
Austrian accomplice and victim no possibility of escape. From the hour
when, in 1853, he boarded Count Richberg on the Carlsbad Railroad, and
forced his enemy of the _Francfort Bund_ to become his humble servant
and carry out all his designs, to the hour when, in 1865, he drove
Franz Joseph to sign the Condiminium on what he knew was a mere waste
paper, he was resolved to turn to account the extraordinary
opportunity offered him by the incredible blindness and insensate
terror of revolution of his allies. In the Austrians, the dread of
what the smaller States, encouraged by Hungary, might attempt,
paralyzed every other consideration, and besides that, the abortive
little plans of Count Beust, in Saxony, served to point out to him
what other Germans were, in a purely German sense, thinking of, and he
decided that the grand historic game thrust upon his perceptions and
waited for by all around him, should be played by himself alone. Then
he played it, not before seeing at once what it must entail, but by no
means assured that he could win.

And then, they who watched him nearest and knew him best, know how he
played that game, mindful of every event that filled the long history
of the past, living over again all the struggles, all the glories and
defeats of all the European nations far or near, finding examples both
to imitate or avoid, losing sight of nothing, from Gregory VII. to
Gutenberg, from papal obscurantism to the Reformation's blaze of
light; from Wallenstein's murder to the treaty of Utrecht; from
Richelieu to the scaffold of Louis XVI., and while calculating every
catastrophe, keeping steadily on his way.

This, the fearful period between the Crimean War, when first Cavour
stepped forth to the incident of Ems, when the die was cast, this was
the really magnificent passage in the great chancellor's career, for
this was the time of possible doubt when responsibility lay so heavy
that to elude it might be called prudence, and which to have survived
is already a proof of superiority over common humanity.

And here we assert the true grandeur of the precursor,--of the one
whom we have called the inventor, and who undeniably was so--of
Cavour! There can be no question that his own intimate familiarity
with the details of the Bond of Virtue and the War of Freedom[7] of
the glorious epoch when modern Germany headed and achieved the
victorious movement against the world's debaseme