ecessary. Nations fulfil their destinies even though their
greatest sons be laid under the turf. And Italy has fulfilled her
destinies, but there are Italians who believe that had Cavour lived to
complete his task, although his dream of an Eirenicon might never have
been realised, their country would not have passed through the _selva
selvaggia_ of mistakes and humiliations into which she now entered.

CHAPTER XVII

ROME OR DEATH

1861-1864

Cavour's Successors--Aspromonte--The September Convention--Garibaldi's
Visit to England.

There were two possible successors to Cavour, the Tuscan, Bettino
Ricasoli, and Urban Rattazzi, a Piedmontese barrister. The first
belonged to the right, the second to the left centre in the
Parliamentary combinations. Cavour had no very close personal
relations with either, but he knew their characters. Rattazzi formerly
held ministerial office under him, and the long Tuscan crisis of 1859,
looked at, as he looked at it, from the inside, gave him opportunities
of judging the Iron Baron who opposed even his own will on more than
one occasion in that great emergency. Ricasoli was rigid, frigid, a
frequenter of the straightest possible roads; Rattazzi, supple,
accommodating, with an incorrigible partiality for umbrageous by-ways.
He was already an 'old parliamentary hand,' and in the future, through
a series of ministerial lapses, any one of which would have condemned
most men to seclusion, he preserved his talent for manufacturing
majorities and holding his party together. Choosing between these two
candidates, Cavour before he died gave his preference to Ricasoli, who
was charged by the King with the formation of a ministry in which he
took the Treasury and the Foreign Office.

Ricasoli was without ambition, and he rather under than over-rated his
abilities, but he went to work with considerable confidence in his power
of setting everything right. A perfectly open and honest statesman
ought to be able, he imagined, to solve the most difficult problems. Why
not, except that the world is not what it ought to be? In home politics
he offended the Party of Action by telling them plainly that if they
broke the law they would have to pay the cost, and he offended his own
party by refusing to interfere with the right of meeting or any other
constitutional right of citizens, whether they were followers of Mazzini
or of anybody else, as long as they kept within legal bounds. He wrote