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