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.