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 upon Roma capitale as 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.