When Garibaldi entered Naples, Cavour had already decided on the momentous step of sending the king's forces into Umbria and the Marches of Ancona. At the end of August he wrote: "We are touching the supreme moment; with God's help, Italy will be made in three months." If constitutional monarchy was to triumph it could no longer stand still; neither Austrian arms nor republican propaganda could so jeopardise the scheme of an Italian kingdom under a prince of the House of Savoy as the demonstration of facts that the Government of Victor Emmanuel had lost the lead. Moreover, it became daily more probable that, if the king did not invade the Roman States from the north, Garibaldi would invade them from the south, and this Cavour was determined to prevent. If a Garibaldian invasion succeeded, France would come into the field; if it failed, all the great results hitherto accomplished would be compromised. Garibaldi at most could only have disposed of half his little army of volunteers, and in Lamoricière, the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, he would have met a stouter antagonist than the Bourbon generals. But the party of action urged him towards Rome, cost what it might, with the impracticability of men who expect the walls of cities to fall at the blast of the trumpet. Every reason, patriotic, political, geographical, justified Cavour's resolution. It was only by force that Umbria and the Marches had been retained under the papal sway in 1859; there was not an Italian who did not look on their liberation as a patriotic duty. The nominal pretext for the war, as has happened in most of the wars of this century, only partially touched the point at issue; Cavour professed to see a menace in the increase of the Pope's army, and demanded its disbandment. In a literal sense, fifteen or twenty thousand men could not be a menace to Italy. Still it must be doubted if any state could have tolerated, in what was now its midst, even this small force, commanded by a foreign general, composed largely of foreign recruits, and proclaiming itself the advance guard of reactionary Europe. Lamoricière said that wherever the revolution appeared, it must be knocked on the head as if it were a mad dog. By "the revolution" he meant Italian unity.
Cavour, the cabinet, and the king were already labouring under the penalties of excommunication by the Bull issued in the spring against all who had taken part in the annexation of Romagna. When Prince Charles of Lorraine in 1690 advised the Emperor to withdraw his claims to Spain and concentrate his energies on uniting Italy, he observed that in order to join the kingdom of Naples with Lombardy, it would be necessary to reduce the Pope to the sole city of Rome. This most able statesman of the House of Hapsburg continued: "The services of very learned doctors should be obtained to instruct the people, both by word of mouth and by writing, on the inutility and illusion of excommunications when it is a question of temporalities, which Jesus Christ never destined to His Church, and which she cannot possess without outraging His example and compromising His Gospel." Cavour did not seek the learned doctors, because he knew that the religious side of the matter, however vital it seemed to the young Breton noblemen who enlisted under Lamoricière, left unmoved the Pope's subjects, who had a mixture of scorn and hatred for the rule of priests, such as was not felt for any government in Italy. For the rest, familiarity lessens the effect of spiritual fulminations, and even of those not spiritual. For three months Cavour had sustained the running fire of all except one of the foreign representatives at Turin; as he wrote to the Marquis E. d'Azeglio: "I have the wholecorps diplomatiqueon my back, Hudson excepted; I let them have their say and I go on." He deplored the sad fate of diplomacy, which always took the most interest in bad causes, and was the more favourable to a government the worse it was.[1] Ifces messieursprotested or departed, they must; he could not arrest the current. If he tried, it would carry him away with it, "which would not be a great evil," but it would carry away the dynasty also. The Peace of Villafranca had caused the Italians to conceive an irresistible desire for unity—events were stronger than men, and he should only stop before fleets and armies.
[Footnote 1: We are reminded of a remark of Prince Bismarck: "Personne, pas même le plus malveillant démocrate, ne se fait une idée de ce qu'il y a de nullité et de charlatanisme dans cette diplomatie."]
It appears that this time Cavour would have acted even without the assent of Napoleon; it was, however, evidently of great moment to secure it if possible. The Emperor was making a tour in the newly acquired province of Savoy when General Cialdini and L.C. Farini were despatched by Cavour to endeavour to win him over. The interview, which was held at Chambéry, was kept so secret that its precise date is not now known. Cavour tried, not for the first time, the effect of entire frankness. He counted on persuading Napoleon that their interests were identical: the White Reaction and the Red Republic were the enemies of both. He did not neglect the item that Lamoricière was disliked at the Tuileries. With regard to Garibaldi, he represented that since the cession of Nice no one could manage him. The end of it was that, if Napoleon did not say the words "Faites, mais faites vite," which rumour attributed to him, he certainly expressed their substance.
On September 11 the Sardinian army, more than double as strong as Lamoricière's, crossed the papal frontier. With the exception of England and Sweden, all the Powers recalled their representatives from Turin. The French Ministry telegraphed to Napoleon, who was at Marseilles, to ask what they were to do. They got no answer, and, left to their own inspiration, they informed the Duke de Grammont, the French Ambassador at Rome, that the Emperor's Government "would not tolerate" the culpable aggression of Sardinia, and that orders were given to embark troops for Ancona. These misleading assurances encouraged Lamoricière, but in any case he would probably have thought it incumbent on him to make what stand he could. He was defeated by Cialdini on the heights of Castelfidardo—"yesterday unknown, to-day immortal," as Mgr. Dupanloup eloquently exclaimed. Ancona fell to a combined attack from land and sea. Meanwhile Fanti advanced on Perugia, and was on the point of entering Viterbo when a detachment from the French garrison in Rome suddenly occupied the town: one of Napoleon's facing-both-ways evolutions by which he thought to save the goat and cabbages of the Italian riddle, but the final result was to lose both one and the other. Lamoricière went home, declaring that he took his defeat less to heart than the cruel disillusions he had undergone in Rome. Some one proposed that he should go to the rescue of King Francis, but he answered that his wish had been to serve the Pope, not the Neapolitan Bourbons.
On the 20th the King of Sardinia, at the head of his army, marched into the kingdom of Naples. For the Continental Powers it was a new act of aggression; for Lord Palmerston, a measure of the highest expediency, to which he had been urging Cavour with an impatience hardly exceeded by that of the most ardent Italian patriot. The goal of Italian unity was now more than in sight—it was touched. The Rubicon was crossed in more senses than one. But at this last stage there arose a danger which Cavour had not seriously apprehended. He thought that Austria would not attack, unless directly provoked by some imprudence of the extreme party. She had allowed the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the King of Naples to fall; why should she be more concerned for the Pope? Austria's concern for the Pope was, in fact, not very deep, but there were Austrian politicians who argued that, if Venetia was to be saved for the empire, the right of Austria to hold it must rest on something more solid than a treaty, every other clause of which had been torn to shreds. Never could a time return so favourable as the present for striking a blow at the nascent Italian kingdom. With the king and the best part of the army in the south, who was there to oppose them? It is true that there was a feeling, growing and expanding silently, which tended all the other way: a feeling that enough of German and Hungarian and Bohemian and Polish blood had been poured out upon Italian plains; that there was a fate in the thing, and the fate was contrary to Austria. This feeling grew and grew till the day when Venice too was lost, and not a man in Austria could find it in his heart to cast one sincere look of regret behind at all that fabric of splendid but ill-fortune-bringing dominion. A few years were still to pass, however, before that day came, and all the forces of the old order combined to press the Emperor to oppose the invading flood while there was time. Some say that he had actually signed the order to cross the frontier, but that on second thoughts he decided first to seek the co-operation of Russia, probably with a view to keeping France quiet. When he went to Warsaw in October, he left everything prepared for war on his return. But Alexander II., having thrown overboard his old friends at Naples, did not want to help the Pope. The Emperor of Austria was badly received by the people of Warsaw, and this tended against the alliance. The Prince Regent of Prussia, who travelled to Warsaw to meet him, definitely refused to guarantee his Venetian possessions. Lord John Russell had lately met the Prussian ruler and his minister, Schleinitz, at Coblentz, and had used all his influence to persuade them to keep Germany out of Italian concerns. Though the Berlin Government loudly protested against the Sardinian attack on papal territory, there is no doubt that the voice of Prussia at Warsaw was raised in favour of peace.
At this juncture Napoleon proposed the usual Congress. While he told Cavour that he must not expect assistance from him, his private language towards the Northern Powers did not exclude the possibility of French intervention. A diversion was created by a note which Lord John Russell addressed to Sir James Hudson, "the most unprincipled document," as it was called at Rome, "that had ever been written by the minister of any civilised court." Lord John defended every act of Sardinia in the strongest and plainest terms, and people grew almost more angry with him than with Cavour. The Italian statesman never quailed through this last perilous crisis; "Nous sommes prêts," he wrote, "à jouer le tout pour le tout." There are moments when the problems of politics, as of life, cease to perplex. By degrees the storm-clouds rolled away without breaking. In November Cavour felt himself strong enough to affirm that the questions of Naples and the Marches were purely Italian, and that the Powers of Europe had no business to meddle with them. During the autumn, amidst other cares, he was seriously preoccupied by a persistent rumour that his faithful friend, Sir James Hudson, was to be removed to make room for the ex-British Minister at Naples, whose occupation was gone through the fall of the dynasty. It has been denied that the change was then contemplated; at any rate it was not carried out till a later period, and Cavour had the comfort of keeping his English fellow-worker near him till he died.
The Garibaldian epic closed with the battle near the left bank of the Volturno on October 1. Still Garibaldi showed no disposition to resign the dictatorship, or to abandon the designs on Rome which he had postponed, not renounced. On his side, Cavour was resolved that a normal government should be established at Naples, and that Garibaldi should not go to Rome, but he was no less resolved that, as far as he could compass it, the giver of two crowns should be generously treated. Unfortunately Fanti, the virtual head of the royal army, represented the old military prejudice which classed volunteers with banditti. A violent scene took place between this general and Cavour; Fanti wished that the Garibaldians should be simply sent home with a gratuity, alleging that "the exigencies of the army" were opposed to the recognition of their grades. Cavour replied that they were not in Spain,—in Italy the army obeyed. The ministerial emissaries in the south received instructions (which they did not invariably execute) to spare no pains to act in harmony with the dictator. Cavour, himself, treated him always as a power and an equal. He took care that he was the first to whom the secret of the invasion of the Marches was confided. He assured him that in case of a war with Austria he would be called upon to play an important part. When the king started on the march for Naples, Cavour wrote to him advising that "infinite regard" should be paid to the leader of the Thousand; "Garibaldi," he added, "has become my most violent enemy, but I desire for the good of Italy, and the honour of your Majesty, that he should retire entirely satisfied." To L.C. Farini, who accompanied the king to Naples, he wrote that the whole of Europe would condemn them if they sacrificed to military pedantry men who had given their blood for Italy. He would bury himself at Leri for the rest of his life rather than be responsible for an act of such black ingratitude. In spite of all he could do, however, a certain grudging spirit hung about the conduct of Piedmontese officialdom towards the volunteers and their chief, but great personal offers were made to Garibaldi—the highest military rank, a castle, a ship, the dowry of a princess for his daughter. All was refused. Garibaldi asked for the governorship of the Two Sicilies for a year with unlimited power, and this, in the opinion of every person of weight in Italy, it was impossible to grant.
In reviewing Cavour's conduct of affairs at this point, it is important to dwell on his unwavering fidelity to constitutional methods. We know now that he was strongly urged to take an opposite course. Ricasoli telegraphed to him: "The master stroke would be to proclaim the dictatorship of the king." The Iron Baron told Victor Emmanuel to his face that it was humiliating for him to accept half Italy as the gift even of a hero. It was no time for scruples; thecoup d'étatwould be legitimised afterwards by universal suffrage; Garibaldi himself would approve of the king's dictatorship if it were accompanied by a thoroughly Italian policy. This was perfectly true; as Cavour said, the conception was really the same as Garibaldi's own: a great revolutionary dictatorship to be exercised in the name of the king without the control of a free press, and with no individual or parliamentary guarantees. But Cavour would have none of it. What, he asked, would England say to acoup d'état?His hope had always been that Italy might make herself a nation without passing through the hands of a Cromwell; that she might win independence without sacrificing liberty, and abolish monarchical absolutism without falling into revolutionary despotism. From parliament alone could be drawn the moral force capable of subduing factions.
Not from his fellow-countrymen only, but from some who believed themselves to be Italy's best friends abroad, came the prompting of the tempter: more power! Few ministers in a predicament of such vast difficulty would have resisted the evil fascination of those two words. Cavour heard them unmoved. He told his various counsellors that they counted too much on his influence, and were too distrustful of liberty. He had no confidence in dictatorships, least of all in civil dictatorships; with a parliament many things could be done which would be impossible to absolute power. The experience of thirteen years convinced him that an honest and energetic ministry, which had nothing to fear from the revelations of the tribune, and which was not of a humour to be intimidated by extreme parties, gained far more than it lost by parliamentary struggles. He never felt so weak as when the Chambers were closed. In a letter to Mme. de Circourt, he said that, if people succeeded in persuading the Italians that they needed a dictator, they would choose Garibaldi, not himself, and they would be right. He summed up the matter thus: "I cannot betray my origin, deny the principles of all my life. I am the son of liberty, and to it I owe all that I am. If a veil is to be placed on its statue, it is not for me to do it."
Meanwhile the edge of the precipice was reached. The king was marching on, and still the dictator held the post which he owed to his sword and the popular will. He openly begged the king to dismiss his minister (in his idea kings could change their ministers as easily as dictators). The public challenge could not be ignored. There was no time to lose, and Cavour lost none; his answer was an appeal to parliament. "A man," he said, "whom the country holds justly dear has stated that he has no confidence in us. It behoves parliament to declare whether we shall retire or continue our work." He invited the deputies to pass a Bill authorising the king's Government to accept the immediate annexation of such provinces of Central and Southern Italy as manifested by universal suffrage their desire to become an integral part of the constitutional monarchy of Victor Emmanuel. This was voted on October 11. The majority of Cavour's party did not believe that Garibaldi would give in to the national mandate; he knew him better. On the 13th the dictator called together his advisers of all shades of opinion. There was a heated discussion: a solution seemed farther off than ever. Then, when they had all spoken, the chief rose serenely and said that, if annexation were the will of the people, he would have annexation;si faccia l'Italia!He decreed the plebiscite, but, having made up his mind, he did not wait for its verdict. He issued one more ukase: "that the Two Sicilies form an integral part of Italy, one and indivisible under the constitutional king, Victor Emmanuel, and his successors." By a stroke of the pen he handed over his conquests as a free gift. It was not constitutional, still less democratic; puritan republicans averted their eyes, so did rigid monarchists, but Cavour was perfectly content. He had forced Garibaldi's hand without straining the royal prerogative or the minister's authority. He had gained his end, and he had not betrayed freedom. It could be argued now with more force than in 1860 that Garibaldi and Ricasoli were right in contending that the best government for the southern populations, only just released from a demoralising yoke, would have been a wise, temporary despotism. But despotisms have the habit of being neither wise nor temporary, and, apart from this, the establishment of any partial or regional rule, which placed the south under different institutions from the rest of Italy, would have killed Italian Unity at its birth.
Cavour went on a brief visit to Naples, his name having been the first to be drawn when the deputies were chosen who were to take the congratulations of parliament to the king. Umbria, the Marches, and the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were joined to the common family. Much had, indeed, been done, but there was trouble still at Gaeta, where Napoleon placed his fleet in such a position as to render an attack from the sea impossible. It was difficult to decide if dust-throwing were the object, or if Napoleonic ideas had taken a new turn. Italy was made, but it might be unmade. This was what French politicians were constantly repeating. "L'Italie est une invention de l'Empereur," said M. Rouher. "Rome l'engloutira!" predicted M. de Girardin. Italy, declared M. Thiers, was an historical parasite which lived on its past and could have no future. If all this were so, the waters would be disturbed again soon, and there might be play for anglers. The Murat scheme would have a new chance, were Victor Emmanuel tried and found wanting. Young Prince Murat confided to his friends that he expected to be wanted soon at Naples; "a great bore," but he would do his duty and go if required.
Whatever purpose Napoleon had in view, he was induced, at last, by the British Government to desist from prolonging a struggle which could only end in one way. The French fleet was withdrawn in January 1861, and Gaeta capitulated on February 13. King Francis began the sad life of exile, which closed a few years ago at Arco. The true Bourbon takes misfortune easily; the pleasures of a mock court are dear to him, his spirits never fail, nor does his appetite. But Francis II., the son of a Savoyard mother, never consoled himself for the loss of country and crown.
Cavour hoped that with the fall of Gaeta the state of the oldRegnowould rapidly improve, but another citadel remained to the reaction—Rome, whence the campaign against unity continued to be directed. A veritableterreur blanche, called by one side brigandage, by the other a holy war, possessed the hills from Vesuvius to the Sila forest. But though there were several foreign noblemen who took part in it, not one Neapolitan of respectability or standing joined the insurgents. The general elections showed in the south, as over the whole country, a large majority pledged to support Cavour. The first act of the new Chamber was to vote the assumption of the title of King of Italy by Victor Emmanuel. The king might have assumed the title a year before with more correctness than the Longobard kings of Italy or the First Consul, but he did well to wait till none could gainsay his right to it. Some faddists proposed to substitute "King of the Italians." Cavour replied that the title of King of Italy was the consecration of a great fact: the transformation of the country, whose very existence as a nation was denied, into the kingdom of Italy. It condensed into one word the history of the work achieved. On the proclamation of the new kingdom Cavour resigned office; Victor Emmanuel, who was never really at his ease with Cavour, thought of accepting in earnest what was done as a matter of form, but Ricasoli dissuaded him from the idea. The Cavour ministry therefore returned to office, with a few modifications.
The new Chamber represented all Italy, except Rome and Venice. From Villafranca to his death, Venice was never out of Cavour's mind. He kept in touch with the revolutionary forces in Hungary, and Kossuth believed to the last that, if Cavour had lived, he would have compassed the liberation of both Hungary and Venetia within the year 1862. He would have supported Lord John Russell's plan, which was that Italy should buy the Herzegovina and give it to Austria in exchange for Venetia, but, on the whole, he thought that the most likely solution was war, in which Prussia and Italy were ranged on the same side. He, almost alone, rated at its true value the latent military force of Prussia. He had a knack of calling Prussia "Germany," as he used to call Piedmont "Italy." He turned off the furious remonstrances which came like the burden of a song from Berlin, with the polite remark that the Prussian Government would be soon very glad to follow his example. When William I. ascended the throne, he ignored the rupture of diplomatic relations, and sent La Marmora to whisper into the ear of the new monarch words of artful flattery. He may have doubted if a Prussianised Germany would exactly come as a boon and a blessing to men. In 1848 he prophesied that Germanism would disturb the European equilibrium, and that the future German Empire would aim at becoming a naval power in order to combat and rival England on the seas. But he saw that the rise of Prussia meant the decline of Austria, and this was all that, as an Italian statesman, with Venetia still in chains, he was bound to consider.
The other unsolved question, that of Rome, was the most thorny, the most complicated, that ever a statesman had to grapple with. Though Cavour's death makes it impossible to say what measure of success would have attended his plans for resolving it, it must be always interesting to study his attitude in approaching the greatest crux in modern politics.
Cavour did not think of shirking this question because it was difficult. In fact, he had understood from the beginning that in it lay the essence of the whole problem. Chiefly for that reason he brought the occupations of the Papal States before the Congress of Paris. In 1856, as in 1861, he looked upon the Temporal Power as incompatible with the independence of Italy. It was already a fiction. "The Pope's domination as sovereign ceased from the day when it was proved that it could not exist save by a double foreign occupation." It had become a centre of corruption, which destroyed moral sense and rendered religious sentiment null. Without the Temporal Power, many of the wounds of the Church might be healed. It was useless to cite the old argument of the independence of the head of the Church; in face of a double occupation and the Swiss troops, it would be too bitter a mockery. When Cavour spoke in these terms, Italian Unity seemed far off. Now that it was accomplished, a new and potent motive arose for settling the Roman question once for all. In May 1861 Mr. Disraeli remarked to Count Vitzthum: "The sooner the inevitable war breaks out the better. The Italian card-house can never last. Without Rome there is no Italy. But that the French will evacuate the Eternal City is highly improbable. On this point the interests of the Conservative party coincide with those of Napoleon." There is no better judge of the drift of political affairs than an out-and-out opponent. So Prince Metternich always insisted that the Italians did not want reforms—they wanted national existence, unity. Mr. Disraeli probably had in mind a speech delivered in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, in which the Foreign Secretary recommended as "the best arrangement" the Pope's retention of Rome with a small surrounding territory. There is no doubt that a large part of the moderate party in Italy would have then endorsed this recommendation. They looked uponRoma capitaleas what D'Azeglio called it—a classical fantasticality. What was the good of making an old man uncomfortable, upsetting the religious susceptibilities of Europe, forfeiting the complaisance of France, in order to pitch the tent of the nation in a malarious town which was only fit to be a museum? Those who only partly comprehended Cavour's character might have expected to find him favourable to these opinions, which had a certain specious appearance of practical good sense. But Cavour saw through the husk to the kernel; he saw that "without Rome there was no Italy."
Without Rome Italian Unity was still only a name. Rome was the symbol, as it was the safeguard of unity. Without it, Italy would remain a conglomeration of provinces, a union, not a unit—not the great nation which Cavour had laboured to create. Even as prime minister of little Piedmont, he had spurned a parochial policy. He had no notion of a humble, semi-neutralised Italy, which should have no voice in the world. Cavour lacked the sense of poetry, of art; he hated fads, and he did not believe in the perfectibility of the human species, but his prose was the prose of the ancient Roman; it was the prose of empire. United Italy must be a great power or nothing. Cavour was practical and prudent, as he is represented in the portrait commonly drawn of him, but there was a larger side to his character, which has been less often discerned. Nor is it to be conjectured that the direction Italy has taken, and the consequent outlay in armaments and ships, would have been blamed by him, though he would have blamed the uncontrolled waste of money in all departments, which is answerable for the present state of the finances. Nor, again, would Cavour have disapproved of colonial enterprises, but he would have taken care to have the meat, not the bones: Tunis, not Massowah. From the opening to the close of his career, the thought "I am an Italian citizen" governed all his acts. Those who accused him of provincialism, of regionalism, mistook the tastes of the private individual for the convictions of the statesman. He preferred the flats and fogs of Leri to the scenery of the Bay of Naples; but in politics he did not acquire the feelings of an Italian: he was born with them. It has been said that he aggrandised Piedmont; it would be truer to say that he sacrificed it. For years he drained its resources; he sent its soldiers to die in the Crimea; he exposed it again and again to the risk of invasion: he tore from it two of its fairest provinces. But there was one thing that he would not do; he would not dethrone Turin to begin a new "regionalism" elsewhere. At Rome alone the history of the Italian municipalities would become the history of the Italian nation.
Cavour deliberately departed from his usual rule of letting events shape themselves when he pledged himself and the monarchy to the policy of making Rome the capital. In October 1860 he said from his place in parliament that it was a grave thing for a minister to pronounce his opinion on the great questions of the future, but a statesman worthy of the name ought to have certain fixed points by which he steered his course. For twelve years their continual object had been national independence; henceforth it was "to make the Eternal City, on which rested twenty-five centuries of glory, the splendid capital of the Italian kingdom."
On March 25, 1861, Cavour seized a chance opportunity to repeat and emphasise his views. The question of Rome was, he said, the gravest ever placed before the parliament of a free people. It was not only of vital importance to Italy, but also to two hundred thousand Catholics in all parts of the globe; its solution ought to have not only a political influence, but also a moral and religious influence. In the previous year he had deemed it wise to speak with reserve, but now that this question was the principal subject of discussion in all civilised nations, reserve would not be prudence but pusillanimity. He proceeded to lay down as an irrefragable fact that Rome must become the capital of Italy. Only this could end the discords and differences of the various parts of the country. The position of the capital was not decided by reasons of climate or topography, or even of strategy. The choice of the capital was determined by great moral reasons, by the voice of national sentiment. Cavour rarely introduced his own personality even into his private letters, much less into his speeches; for the last ten years of his life he seemed a living policy, hardly a man. But in this speech there is a touch of personal pathos in the passage in which he said that, for himself, it would be a grievous day when he had to leave his native Turin with its straight, formal streets, for Rome and its splendid monuments, for which he was not artist enough to care. He called upon the future Italy, established firmly in the Eternal City, to remember the cradle of her liberties, which had made such great sacrifices for her, and was ready to make this one too!
They must go to Rome, he continued, but on two conditions—the first was, concert with France; the second, that the union of this city with Italy should not be interpreted by the great mass of Catholics as the signal for the servitude of the Church. They must go to Rome without lessening the Pope's real independence, and without extending the power of the civil authority over the spiritual. History proved that the union of civil and spiritual authority in the same hands was fatal to progress and freedom. The possession of Rome by Italy must put an end to this union, not begin a new phase of it by making the Pope a sort of head chaplain or chief almoner to the Italian state. The Pope's spiritual authority would be safer in the charge of twenty-six millions of free Italians than in that of a foreign garrison. Whether they went to Rome with or without the consent of the Pontiff, as soon as the fall of the Temporal Power was proclaimed, the complete liberty of the Church would be proclaimed also. Might they not hope that the head of the Church would accept the offered terms? Was it impossible to persuade him that the Temporal Power was no longer a guarantee of independence, and that its loss would be compensated by an amount of liberty which the Church had sought in vain for three centuries, only gathering particles of it by concordats which conceded the use of spiritual arms to temporal rulers? They were ready to promise the Holy Father that freedom which he had never obtained from those who called themselves his allies and devoted sons. They were ready to assert through every portion of the king's dominions the great principle ofa free church in a free state.
At Cavour's invitation, parliament voted the choice of Rome as capital. From that vote there could be no going back.Roma capitalecould never again be put aside as the dream of revolutionists and poets. This was the last great political act of Cavour's life. Though he did not think that his life would be a long one, he thought that he should have time to finish his work himself. One day, when he had been discussing the matter with a friend, who saw nothing but difficulties, he placed the inkstand at the top of the table before which they were sitting, and said, "I see the straight line to that point; it is this" (he traced it with his finger). "Supposing that halfway I encounter an impediment; I do not knock my head against it for the pleasure of breaking it, but neither do I go back. I look to the right and to the left, and not being able to follow the straight line, I make a curve. I turn the obstacle which I cannot attack in front."
What Cavour would have called the straight line to Rome was a friendly arrangement with the Pope. He could not have hoped for this, had he been less convinced that the true interests of the Church of Rome would be served, not injured, by the loss of a sovereignty which had become an anachronism. It is, of course, certain that many thought the contrary; Lord Palmerston believed that the religious position of the papacy would suffer, and among the advanced party the wish to weaken the spiritual influence of the priests went along with the wish to abolish their political dominion. Cavour looked upon religion as a great moralising force, and he was well assured that the only form of it acceptable to the Italian people was the Latin form of Christianity established in Rome. Efforts to spread Protestantism in Italy struck him as childish. Freed from the log of temporalities, he expected that the Church would become constantly better fitted to perform its mission.
Cavour began negotiations with Rome which, at first, he had reason to think, were favourably entertained; afterwards they were abruptly broken off. Nothing is more difficult than to penetrate through the wall of apparent unanimity which surrounds the Vatican. Sometimes, however, a breach is made, to the scandal of the faithful. Thus the biographer of Cardinal Manning revealed the fact that the late Archbishop of Westminster, who began by wishing the Temporal Power to be erected into an article of faith, ended by ardently desiring some kind of tacitly acceptedmodus vivendiwith the Italian kingdom, such as that which Cavour proposed. Cardinal Manning was sorry to see the Italians being driven to atheism and socialism, and so he had the courage to change his mind. In 1861 he was in the opposite camp, but there was not wanting then a section of learned and patriotic ecclesiastics who desired peace. It was said that their efforts were rendered sterile by the great organisation which a pope once suppressed, and which owed its resurrection to a schismatic emperor and an heretical king. However that may be, the recollection of what befell Clement XIV. is still a living force in Rome.
Having failed to conclude a compact with the Vatican, Cavour turned to France. To make it easier for Napoleon to withdraw his troops, he was willing to allow the Temporal Power to stand for a short time—"for instance, for a year"—after their departure. In the arrangement subsequently arrived at under the name of the September Convention, the underlying intention was to adjournRoma capitaleto the Greek kalends. Cavour had no such intention, nor would he have agreed to the transference of the capital to Florence. His plan was warmly supported by Prince Napoleon, and had he lived it is probable that it would have been carried out. He did not despair of an ultimate reconciliation with the Holy See, though he no longer thought that it would yield to persuasion alone.
While Cavour was applying himself with feverish activity to the Roman question, he was harassed by the state of the Neapolitan provinces, which showed no improvement. The liquidation of Garibaldi's dictatorship was rendered the more difficult by the undiminished dislike of the military chiefs for the volunteers, whom they were disposed to treat less favourably than the Bourbon officers who ran away. Cavour hoped to get substantial justice done in the end, but meantime he had to bear the blame for the illiberality which he had so strenuously opposed. To have told the truth would have been to throw discredit on the army, and this he would not do. The subject was brought before the Chamber of Deputies in a debate opened by Ricasoli, who spoke in favour of the volunteers, but deprecated undue importance being assigned to the work of any private citizen. The true liberator of Italy was the king under whom they had all worked; those whose sphere of action had been widest, as their utility had been greatest, should feel thankful for so precious a privilege—few men could say, "I have served my country well, I have entirely done my duty." Cavour, who heard Ricasoli speak for the first time, said with generous approbation, "I have understood to-day what real eloquence is." But it was not likely that the debate would continue on this academic plane. Garibaldi had come to Turin in a fit of intense anger at the treatment of his old comrades, and on rising to defend them he soon lost control over himself, and launched into furious invectives against the man who had made him a foreigner in his native town, and "who was now driving the country into civil war." Cavour would have borne patiently anything that Garibaldi could say about Nice, but at the words "civil war" he became violently excited. The house trembled lest a scene should take place, which would be worse for Italy than the loss of a battle. But Cavour cared too much for Italy to harm her. The sense of his first indignant protests was lost in the general uproar; afterwards, when he rose to reply to Garibaldi, he was perfectly calm; there was not a trace of resentment on his face. Such self-command would have been noble in a man whose temperament was phlegmatic; in a passionate man like Cavour it was heroic. He said that an abyss had been created between himself and General Garibaldi. He had performed what he believed to be a duty, but it was the most cruel duty of his life. What he felt made him able to understand what Garibaldi felt. With regard to the volunteers, had he not himself instituted them in 1859 in the teeth of all kinds of opposition? Was it likely that he wished to treat them ill? A few days later Garibaldi wrote a letter in which he promised Cavour (in effect) plenary absolution if he would proclaim a dictatorship. He would then be the first to obey. There was no petty spite or envy in Garibaldi; his wild thrusts had been prompted by "a general honest thought, and common good to all." He was ready to give his rival unlimited power.
By the king's wish, Cavour and Garibaldi met and exchanged a few courteous, if not cordial, words. Cavour ignored the scene in the Chamber; he had already said that for him it had never happened. It was their last meeting. The wear and tear of public life as it was lived by Cavour must have been enormous; it meant the concentration, not only of the mental and physical powers, but also of the nervous and emotional faculties, on a single object. He had not the relaxation of athletic or literary tastes, or the repose of a cheerful domestic life. Latterly he even gave up going to the theatre in order to dose undisturbed. A doctor warned him not to work after dinner, and to take frequent holidays in the mountains; he neglected both rules. He was inclined to despise rest. He used to say: "When I want a thing to be done quickly, I always go to a busy man: the unoccupied man never has any time." He, himself, did not know how to be idle; yet he was painfully conscious of overwork and brain-fag. He told his friend Castelli that he was tormented by sleeplessness, but still more by certain ideas which assailed him at night, and which he could not get rid of. He got up and walked about the room, but all was useless; "I am no longer master of my head." When Parliament was open, he never missed a sitting, and he left nothing to subordinates in the several departments in his charge. While his mental processes remained clear and orderly, the brain, when not governed by the will, did its tasks as a tired slave does them; thus he was surrounded by a mass of confused papers and documents, amongst which he sometimes had to seek for days for the one required at the moment.
In the last half of May he was noticed to be unwontedly irritable and impatient of contradiction. The debates bored him; on the last day that he sat in his accustomed place, he said that, when Italy was made, he would bring in a Bill to abolish all the chairs of rhetoric. That evening he was taken ill with fever; his own physician was absent, and he dictated a treatment to the doctor who was called in, which he thought would make his illness a short one. He was bled five times in four days. On the fourth day he summoned a cabinet council to his bedside; the ministers, sharing his own opinion that he was better, allowed it to be prolonged for several hours. When they went out, an old friend came in and read death in his face. Other doctors were consulted, and the treatment was changed. It was too late. From the first the chance of recovery was small, owing to the mental tension at which Cavour had lived for months; whatever chance there was had been thrown away. He knew people when he first saw them, but then fell back into lethargy or delirium. Suddenly he said: "The king must be told."
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 Maestà!" 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."
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