ni, and maintained them, off and on, for years,
proves amongst other things, that he knew the exiled patriot better
than the world yet knew him. He may have understood that by turning
republican sympathies into the groove of unity (not their necessary or
even their most natural groove), Mazzini made an Italian kingdom
possible. There is reason to think that the King's ministers were
kept entirely ignorant of his correspondence with the Agitator. The
letters were impersonal drafts carried to and fro by means of trusted
emissaries; each party freely expounded his views, and stated the
terms on which his support could be given. Victor Emmanuel's favourite
idea was a revolution in Galicia. When Garibaldi returned from England
he was nearly commissioned to start for Constantinople, whence he was
to lead an expedition through Roumania into Galicia. It seems to have
been due to Garibaldi's own good sense that so extremely unpromising a
project was abandoned. General Klapka was another of Victor Emmanuel's
secret revolutionary correspondents. The very wildness of the plans
that floated in the air betokened the feverish anxiety to do something
which had taken hold of all minds.

In 1865 a scheme of a different sort, and of momentous consequences,
grew into shape. It was a scheme of which Cavour first guessed the
possibility, as well as the far-reaching results. In August 1865 Count
Bismarck asked General La Marmora whether Italy would join Prussia in
the contingency of a war with Austria? Only a year before he was still
thinking of carrying out his policy with the aid of Austria, and he
had offered to help her to wrench Lombardy from Italy (and from France
if she intervened), in payment for her consent to his designs. But
now, though the Austrians did not even remotely suspect it, his
thoughts were resolutely turned to the Italian alliance. Without this
alliance Italy might, indeed, have acquired Venice, but would the
German Empire have been founded?

For a time the proposal was suspended, owing to the temporary
understanding concluded between Prussia and Austria at Gastein; and
in the interim, General La Marmora urged the Viennese Government to
cede Venetia in return for a compensation of five hundred million
francs. But those whom the gods would destroy they make mad. Austria
preserved her infatuated sense of security almost till the rude
awakening caused by the rifle-shots that ushered in the campaign of
Sadowa.

One thin