th a few modifications.

The new Chamber represented all Italy, except Rome and Venice. From
Villafranca to his death, Venice was never out of Cavour's mind. He
kept in touch with the revolutionary forces in Hungary, and Kossuth
believed to the last that, if Cavour had lived, he would have
compassed the liberation of both Hungary and Venetia within the year
1862. He would have supported Lord John Russell's plan, which was that
Italy should buy the Herzegovina and give it to Austria in exchange
for Venetia, but, on the whole, he thought that the most likely
solution was war, in which Prussia and Italy were ranged on the same
side. He, almost alone, rated at its true value the latent military
force of Prussia. He had a knack of calling Prussia "Germany," as he
used to call Piedmont "Italy." He turned off the furious remonstrances
which came like the burden of a song from Berlin, with the polite
remark that the Prussian Government would be soon very glad to follow
his example. When William I. ascended the throne, he ignored the
rupture of diplomatic relations, and sent La Marmora to whisper into
the ear of the new monarch words of artful flattery. He may have
doubted if a Prussianised Germany would exactly come as a boon and a
blessing to men. In 1848 he prophesied that Germanism would disturb
the European equilibrium, and that the future German Empire would aim
at becoming a naval power in order to combat and rival England on
the seas. But he saw that the rise of Prussia meant the decline of
Austria, and this was all that, as an Italian statesman, with Venetia
still in chains, he was bound to consider.

CHAPTER XIII

ROME VOTED THE CAPITAL--CONCLUSION

The other unsolved question, that of Rome, was the most thorny, the
most complicated, that ever a statesman had to grapple with. Though
Cavour's death makes it impossible to say what measure of success
would have attended his plans for resolving it, it must be always
interesting to study his attitude in approaching the greatest crux in
modern politics.

Cavour did not think of shirking this question because it was
difficult. In fact, he had understood from the beginning that in it
lay the essence of the whole problem. Chiefly for that reason he
brought the occupations of the Papal States before the Congress of
Paris. In 1856, as in 1861, he looked upon the Temporal Power as
incompatible with the independence of Italy. It was already a fiction.
"The Pope's dom