ty, to his
unbounded astonishment, proposed his health. Taken unawares, he
expressed his thanks in a few words, which were well received, and on
sitting down he said to his neighbour, the Earl of Ripon, "C'est mon
_maiden speech_!" Lord Ripon remarked, "with a significant smile,"
that he hoped it would be the opening of a long career. He dined with
John Murray, and went to see Faraday, who in his working clothes made
him think of a philosopher of the sixteenth century. At a party given
by Babbage, the mathematician, he met Hallam, Tocqueville, Ada Byron,
and the three beautiful daughters of Sheridan. With Nassau Senior he
began a long friendship, and Edward Romilly, the librarian of Trinity
College, Cambridge, whom he had met at Geneva, introduced him to a
rich landed proprietor of the name of Davenport, who was to prove the
most useful of all his English acquaintances, as he liberally placed
his house in Cheshire at Cavour's disposal to give him an opportunity
of studying English agriculture. The chance was not thrown away.
Cavour learnt everything about the management of a well-ordered
English estate down to the minutest particulars. He admired much,
especially the system of subsoil drainage, then a novelty to
foreigners, but he was not carried away by the beautiful appearance of
the English country so far as to think that the English farmer was in
all respects ahead of the North Italian. He compared the up-and-down
English meadow left to itself with the highly-manured pasture lands of
Piedmont, level as billiard-boards, which yield their three crops of
hay a year. One point Cavour was never tired of impressing on students
of agriculture; it was this, and it exactly shows his habit of mind:
never consider results without knowing what they cost. Correct the
selling price by the cost of production. He had no patience with model
farms; they might be magnificent, but they were not agriculture. In
one of his earliest writings he held them up to ridicule.

In England he studied the then new Poor Laws; even before he started
on his first travels, he decided to inquire into the position of the
poorest classes in the countries he visited. He recognised that the
acknowledgment of the prescriptive right of every member of the
community to food and shelter was the first step to vast changes in
social legislation. Cavour's natural inclinations were more those of
a social and economic reformer than of the political innovator.
Gasw