olicy. He had no notion of a
humble, semi-neutralised Italy, which should have no voice in the
world. Cavour lacked the sense of poetry, of art; he hated fads, and
he did not believe in the perfectibility of the human species, but his
prose was the prose of the ancient Roman; it was the prose of empire.
United Italy must be a great power or nothing. Cavour was practical
and prudent, as he is represented in the portrait commonly drawn of
him, but there was a larger side to his character, which has been less
often discerned. Nor is it to be conjectured that the direction Italy
has taken, and the consequent outlay in armaments and ships, would
have been blamed by him, though he would have blamed the uncontrolled
waste of money in all departments, which is answerable for the present
state of the finances. Nor, again, would Cavour have disapproved of
colonial enterprises, but he would have taken care to have the meat,
not the bones: Tunis, not Massowah. From the opening to the close of
his career, the thought "I am an Italian citizen" governed all his
acts. Those who accused him of provincialism, of regionalism, mistook
the tastes of the private individual for the convictions of the
statesman. He preferred the flats and fogs of Leri to the scenery of
the Bay of Naples; but in politics he did not acquire the feelings
of an Italian: he was born with them. It has been said that he
aggrandised Piedmont; it would be truer to say that he sacrificed it.
For years he drained its resources; he sent its soldiers to die in the
Crimea; he exposed it again and again to the risk of invasion: he tore
from it two of its fairest provinces. But there was one thing that he
would not do; he would not dethrone Turin to begin a new "regionalism"
elsewhere. At Rome alone the history of the Italian municipalities
would become the history of the Italian nation.

Cavour deliberately departed from his usual rule of letting events
shape themselves when he pledged himself and the monarchy to the
policy of making Rome the capital. In October 1860 he said from his
place in parliament that it was a grave thing for a minister to
pronounce his opinion on the great questions of the future, but a
statesman worthy of the name ought to have certain fixed points by
which he steered his course. For twelve years their continual object
had been national independence; henceforth it was "to make the Eternal
City, on which rested twenty-five centuries of glory, the spl