level as billiard-boards, which yield their three crops of hay a year.  One point Cavour was never tired of impressing on students of agriculture; it was this, and it exactly shows his habit of mind:  never consider results without knowing what they cost.  Correct the selling price by the cost of production.  He had no patience with model farms; they might be magnificent, but they were not agriculture.  In one of his earliest writings he held them up to ridicule.

In England he studied the then new Poor Laws; even before he started on his first travels, he decided to inquire into the position of the poorest classes in the countries he visited.  He recognised that the acknowledgment of the prescriptive right of every member of the community to food and shelter was the first step to vast changes in social legislation.  Cavour’s natural inclinations were more those of a social and economic reformer than of the political innovator.  Gasworks, factories, hospitals, and prisons were in turn inspected.  Cavour went thoroughly into the questions of prison labour and diet.  He did not object to the treadmill in itself, but thought unfruitful labour demoralising.  Useful work with a small gain reformed the convict.  The prison fare seemed to him rather too good.  He was impressed by the bread “as good as the best that is consumed in the clubs.”  Probably, next to the policeman, what impresses the thinking foreigner most in the British Isles is the Englishman’s loaf of white bread.  It might appear that in his close study of utilitarian England, Cavour missed the greater England of imagination and adventure, of genius and energy.  It is true that he did homage at the shrine of Shakespeare by a visit to Stratford-on-Avon, and that he declared that there was no sight in the world equal to the Life Guards on their superb black horses.  But his real appreciation of the greatness of England is not to be looked for in the jottings of the tourist; it stands forth conspicuously in his few but singularly weighty early political writings.  The English politician whom he most admired was Pitt.  The preference was striking in a young man who was considered a dangerous liberal in his own country.  It showed amongst other things an adoption of an English standpoint in appraising English policy which is rare in a foreigner.  “In attacking France,” Cavour wrote, “Pitt preserved social order in England, and kept civilisation in the paths of that regular and gradual progress which it has followed ever since.”  He said of him:  “He loved power not as an end but as a means”—­words which long after he applied to himself:  “You know that I care nothing for power as power; I care for it only as a means to compass the good of my country.”