When the case became evidently desperate, the family sent for a monk, named Fra Giacomo, who had promised Cavour during the cholera epidemic of 1854 that the refusal of the sacraments to Santa Rosa should not be repeated in his own extremity. An excited crowd gathered round the palace. One workman said: "If the priests refuse, a word and we will finish them all." But Fra Giacomo kept his promise. "I know the Count," he said (for many years he had dispensed his private charities); "a clasp of the hand will be sufficient." On the evening of the same day, June 5, the king ascended the secret staircase leading to Cavour's bedroom, which had been so often mounted before dawn by too compromising visitors. Cavour exclaimed on seeing him: "O Maesta!" but the recognition seemed not to last. "These Neapolitans, they must be cleansed," he said, interrupting the sovereign's kind commonplaces of a hope that was not. Then he ordered that his secretary, Artom, should be ready to transact business with him at five next morning; "there was no time to lose." Cavour's biographers have repeated statements as to precepts and injunctions spoken by him in his last hours. But he was continually delirious; all that could be understood was that his wandering mind was running on what had been the life of his life, Italy. In the early dawn of the 6th, he imagined that he was making a ministerial statement from his place in the Chamber of Deputies; his voice sounded clear and distinct, but ideas, names, words, were incoherently mixed together. At four o'clock he became silent, and very soon life was pronounced to be extinct.

One Sunday in June, a year before, Cavour spent some hours in the ancestral castle at Santena, which he so rarely visited. On that occasion he said to the village syndic: "Here I wish my bones to rest." The wish was respected, the king yielding to it his own desire to give his great minister a royal burial at the Superga. Cavour had the old sentiment that it was well for a man to be buried where his fathers were buried, and to die in their faith. At all times it would have been repugnant to him to pose as a sceptic, most of all on his deathbed. Once, when he was reminded in the Campo Santo at Pisa that he was standing on holy earth brought from Palestine, he said, smiling, "Perhaps they will make a saint of me some day." He died a Catholic, and, instead of launching its censures against Fra Giacomo, the Church might have written "ancor questo" among its triumphs. For the rest, with minds such as Cavour's, religion is not the mystical elevation of the soul towards God, but the intellectual assent to the ruling of a superior will, and religious forms are, in substance, symbols of that assent. The essence of Cavour's theology and morality is expressed in two sayings of Epictetus. One is, that as to piety to the gods, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them; to think that they exist, and that they administer the all well and justly. The other is: For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you.

"Cavour," said Lord Palmerston in the classic home of constitutional liberty, the British House of Commons, "left a name 'to point a moral and adorn a tale.'" The moral was, that a man of transcendent talent, indomitable industry, inextinguishable patriotism, could overcome difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and confer the greatest, the most inestimable benefits on his country. The tale with which his memory would be associated was the most extraordinary, the most romantic, in the annals of the world. A people which seemed dead had arisen to new and vigorous life, breaking the spell which bound it, and showing itself worthy of a new and splendid destiny. The man whose name would go down to posterity linked with such events might have died too soon for the hopes of his fellow-citizens, not for his fame and his glory.

After thirty-seven years nothing need be taken away from this high eulogy, and something can be added. The completion of the national edifice within a decade of Cavour's death was still, in a sense, his work, as the consolidation of the United States after the death of Lincoln was still moulded by his vanished hand.

If it be true that the world's history is the world's judgment, it is no less true that the history of the state is the judgment of the statesman. Cavour would not have asked to be tried by any other criterion. He achieved a great result. He doubted if ideals of perfection could he reached, or whether, if reached, they would not be found, like mountain tops, to afford no abiding place for the foot of man. Perhaps he forgot too much that from the ice and snow of the mountain comes the river which fertilises the land. But, if he deprecated the pursuit of what he deemed the impossible, he condemned as criminal the neglect of the attainable. The charge of cynicism was unjust; Cavour was at heart an optimist; he never doubted that life was immensely worth living, that the fields open to human energy were splendid and beneficent. He hated shams, and he hated all forms of caste-feeling. He was one of the few continental statesmen who never exaggerated the power for good of government; he looked upon the private citizen who plods at his business, gives his children a good education, and has a reserve of savings in the funds, as the mainstay of the state.

No life of Cavour has been written since the publication of his correspondence, and of a mass of documents which throw light on his career. It has seemed more useful, therefore, within the prescribed limits, to endeavour to show what he did, and how he did it, than to give much space to the larger considerations which the Italian movement suggests. Of the ultimate issue of the events with which he was concerned it is too soon to speak. These events stand in close relation to the struggle between the civil and ecclesiastical powers, which dates back to the first assumption of political prerogatives by the Bishops of Rome. Cavour did not suffer his sovereign to eat humble pie like King John, or to go to Canossa like Henry IV., but neither did he ever entertain the wish to turn persecutor as Pombal was, perhaps, forced to do, or to browbeat the head of the Church as the first Napoleon took a pleasure in doing. He aimed at keeping the two powers separate, but each supreme in its own province.

Content you with monopolising heaven, And let this little hanging ball alone; For, give ye but a foot of conscience there, And you, like Archimedes, toss the globe.

The Italian revolution was bound up, also, with the principle of nationalities, which is still at work in South-Eastern Europe, and with the tendency towards unity which led to the refounding of the German Empire. Students who care for historical parallels will always seek to draw a comparison between Cavour and the great man who guided the new destinies of Germany. The points of resemblance are striking, but they are soon exhausted. Each undertook to free his country from extraneous influence, and to give it the strength which can only spring from union, and each was confident in his own power to succeed; either Cavour or Bismarck might have said with the younger Pitt: "I know that I can save the country, and I know no other man can." The points of disparity are inexhaustible. Prince Bismarck never threw off the aristocratico-military leanings with which he began life. He aimed at creating a strong military empire, in which the first and last duty of parliament was to vote supplies. Though the revolutionary tide set in towards unity still more in Germany than in Italy, he preferred to wait till he could do without a popular movement as an auxiliary. He did not admire the mysticism of King Frederick William IV., but he fully approved when that monarch, "the son of twenty-four electors and kings," declared that he would never accept the "iron collar" offered him by revolution "of an Imperial crown unblessed by God." Bismarck started with the immeasurable advantage that his side was the strongest. Cavour had to solve the problem of how a state of five millions could outwit an empire of thirty-seven millions. All along, the German population of Prussia was far more numerous than that of Austria, and she had allies that cost her nothing. Napoleon, as Cavour pointed out, fought for Prussia in Lombardy as much as for Piedmont. If Bismarck foresaw unification with more certainty than Cavour foresaw unity, it must be remembered that, while Cavour was held back by doubts as to whether the whole country desired unity, such doubts caused no trouble to Bismarck, since he was ready to adopt a short way with dissidents.

When Prince Bismarck once said that he was more Prussian than German, he revealed the weak side of his stupendous achievement. Prussia has not become Germany. The empire is a great defensive league in which only one participant is entirely satisfied with his position. In Italy a kingdom has grown up in which Piedmont, even to the extent of ingratitude, is forgotten. If moral fusion is still incomplete, political fusion has, at least, advanced so far that the present institutions and the nation must stand or fall together. The monarchy was made for the country, not the country for the monarchy. An acute Frenchman remarked during the Franco-German War, that Prince Bismarck had taken Cavour's conception without what made it really great—liberty. Possibly that word may still prove of better omen to the rebirth of a nation than "Blood and Iron."



CHIEF AUTHORITIES

Artom I. and A. Blanc. Il Conte di Cavour in Parlamento. Florence, 1868.

Bersezio, V. Il regno di Vittorio Emanuele II.; Trent' anni di vita italiana. Turin, 1878-95. 8 vols.

Bert, A. Nouvelles lettres inedites de Cavour. Turin, 1889.

Berti, D. Il Conte di Cavour avanti al 1848. Rome, 1886.

Bianchi, N. La politique du Comte Camille de Cavour. Turin, 1885.

Bonghi, R. Ritratti contemporanei: Cavour, Bismarck, Thiers. Milan, 1879.

Buzziconi, G. Bibliografia Cavouriana. Turin, 1898.

Cavour, C. Opere politico-economiche del Conte Camillo di Cavour. Cuneo, 1855.

—— Discorsi parlamentari del Conte Camillo di Cavour. Published by order of the Chamber of Deputies. Turin, 1863-72. 8 vols.

Chiala, L. Il Conte di Cavour. Ricordi di Michelangelo Castelli, editi per cura di L. Chiala. Turin, 1886.

—— Lettere edite ed inedite di Camillo Cavour. Turin, 1883-87. 7 vols.

Dicey, E. Memoir of Cavour. London, 1861.

La Rive (De), W. Le Comte de Cavour. Recits et souvenirs. Paris, 1862.

La Varenne (De), C. Lettres inedites du Comte de Cavour au Commandeur Urbain Rattazzi. Paris, 1862.

Marriott, F. La sapienza politica del Conte di Cavour e del Principe di Bismarck. Turin, 1886.

Marriott, F. The Makers of Modern Italy. London, 1889.

Massari, G. Il Conte di Cavour. Turin, 1873.

Mazade (De), C. Le Comte de Cavour. Paris, 1877.

Nigra, C. Le Comte de Cavour et la Comtesse de Circourt. Turin, 1894.

Reumont (Von.), A. Charakterbilder aus der neuern Geschichte Italiens. Leipzig, 1886.

Reyntiens, M.N. Bismarck et Cavour. Bruxelles, 1875.

Tivaroni, C. Storia critica del risorgimento d'Italia. Turin, 1888-97. 9 vols.

Treitschke (Von), H. "Cavour," in Historische und politische Aufsaetze. Leipzig, 1871.

Zanichelli, D. Gli scritti del Conte di Cavour. Bologna, 1892.

Also the Memoirs and Correspondence of Ricasoli, La Farina, Kossuth, Minghetti, D'Azeglio, Lanza, Arese, Della Rocca.

THE END