ing the
supreme moment; with God's help, Italy will be made in three months."
If constitutional monarchy was to triumph it could no longer stand
still; neither Austrian arms nor republican propaganda could so
jeopardise the scheme of an Italian kingdom under a prince of the
House of Savoy as the demonstration of facts that the Government of
Victor Emmanuel had lost the lead. Moreover, it became daily more
probable that, if the king did not invade the Roman States from the
north, Garibaldi would invade them from the south, and this Cavour was
determined to prevent. If a Garibaldian invasion succeeded, France
would come into the field; if it failed, all the great results
hitherto accomplished would be compromised. Garibaldi at most could
only have disposed of half his little army of volunteers, and in
Lamoriciere, the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, he would have met a
stouter antagonist than the Bourbon generals. But the party of action
urged him towards Rome, cost what it might, with the impracticability
of men who expect the walls of cities to fall at the blast of the
trumpet. Every reason, patriotic, political, geographical, justified
Cavour's resolution. It was only by force that Umbria and the Marches
had been retained under the papal sway in 1859; there was not an
Italian who did not look on their liberation as a patriotic duty. The
nominal pretext for the war, as has happened in most of the wars
of this century, only partially touched the point at issue; Cavour
professed to see a menace in the increase of the Pope's army, and
demanded its disbandment. In a literal sense, fifteen or twenty
thousand men could not be a menace to Italy. Still it must be doubted
if any state could have tolerated, in what was now its midst, even
this small force, commanded by a foreign general, composed largely
of foreign recruits, and proclaiming itself the advance guard of
reactionary Europe. Lamoriciere said that wherever the revolution
appeared, it must be knocked on the head as if it were a mad dog. By
"the revolution" he meant Italian unity.

Cavour, the cabinet, and the king were already labouring under the
penalties of excommunication by the Bull issued in the spring against
all who had taken part in the annexation of Romagna. When Prince
Charles of Lorraine in 1690 advised the Emperor to withdraw his claims
to Spain and concentrate his energies on uniting Italy, he observed
that in order to join the kingdom of Naples with Lombardy,