n of very
different parties) that to accomplish great changes you have to make
sacrifices, not only of the higher sort, but, in a certain sense, also
of the lower. As he thought that the Austrians could not be expelled
from Italy for good and all without foreign help, he contemplated from
the first securing that foreign help, though no one would have been
more glad than he to do without it. He thought that Italian freedom
could not be won without a closer alliance with the democratic party
than politicians like D'Azeglio, who had the fear of the ermine, of
tarnishing its whiteness, would have ever brought themselves to
acquiesce in, and he therefore immediately took steps to establish
that alliance. Cavour had no faith in the creation of ideally perfect
states, such as the Monarchy of Dante or the Republic of Mazzini, but
he did think that a living land was better than a dead one, that the
struggle of an awakening power, the rush of a new nation, was
infinitely to be preferred to the desolation of dreamy sleeps, sweet
silences, and everlasting memories that spelt regrets.

It may be possible now to see clearly that if no one had tried for the
unattainable, Cavour would not have found the ground prepared for his
work. The appreciation of his rank among Italian liberators rests on a
different point, and it is this: without a man of his positive mould,
of his practical genius, of his force of will and force of patience,
would the era of splendid endeavours have passed into the era of
accomplished facts? If the answer to this is 'No,' then nothing can
take from Cavour the glory of having conferred an incalculable boon on
the country which he loved with a love that was not the less strong
because it lacked the divinising qualities of imagination.

An aristocrat by birth and the inheritor of considerable wealth,
Cavour was singularly free from prejudices; his favourite study was
political economy, and in quiet times he would probably have given all
his energies to the interests of commerce and agriculture. He was an
advocate of free trade, and was, perhaps, the only one of the many
Italians who _feted_ Mr Cobden on his visit to Italy who cared in the
least for the motive of his campaign. Cavour understood English
politics better than they have ever been understood by a foreign
statesman; his article on Ireland, written in 1843, may still be read
with profit. Before parliamentary life existed in Piedmont, he took
the only wa