Garibaldi had performed every act since he landed in Sicily in Victor Emmanuel’s name, Cavour was more and more afraid of the republicans in his camp.  He exaggerated their influence over their leader, who, in vital matters, was not easy to move, and he did not believe that, in accordance with Mazzini’s instructions, they were working for unity regardless of the form of government which might follow.  Victor Emmanuel could sound the depths of Mazzini’s patriotism; Cavour never could.  The two men were made to misunderstand each other.  There are differences too fundamental for even imagination to bridge over.  Had they lived till now, when both are raised on pedestals in the Italian House of Fame, from which time shall not remove them, Mazzini would still have been for Cavour, and Cavour for Mazzini, the evil genius of his country.

The nightmare of Red Republicanism taking the bit between its teeth and bolting was not the only terror that disturbed Cavour’s rest.  He shuddered at the establishment of a dictatorial democracy which placed unlimited power in the hands of men of no experience, with only the lantern of advanced Liberalism to guide them.  He, who had tried to make the Italian cause look respectable, as well as meritorious, asked himself what these improvised statesmen would do next?  The Garibaldian dictatorship has not lacked defenders, and two of its administrators lived to be prime ministers of Italy, but it was inevitable that Cavour should judge it as he did.

A dualism began between Palermo and Turin, which would not have reached the point that it did reach, if La Farina, who was commissioned by Cavour to promote annexation, had not launched into a furious personal warfare with his fellow-Sicilian Crispi, a far stronger combatant than he.  Garibaldi ended by putting La Farina on board a Sardinian man-of-war, and begging the admiral to convey him home.  The dictator bombarded the king’s Government with advice, to which Cavour alludes without irritation:  “He writes and rewrites, and telegraphs night and day, urging us with counsels, warnings, reproaches—­I might almost say menaces.”  Garibaldi, he goes on to say, has a generous character, poetic instincts, but his is an untamed nature, on which certain impressions leave ineffaceable traces; he feels the cession of Nice as a personal injury, and he will never forgive it.  The king has a certain influence over him, but it would be madness to seek to employ it in favour of the Ministry; he would lose it, which would be a great misfortune.  How few ministers who, like Cavour, were accustomed to be all-powerful, would have met unrelenting opposition in this spirit!