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,