Cavour had the cast of mind which admires in others its own qualities.  As he revered Pitt’s “vast and puissant intelligence,” so he sympathised with Peel’s logic and courage.  Peel was his favourite among his contemporaries; he called him “the statesman who more than any other had the instinct of the necessity of the moment.”  He foretold Peel’s abolition of the Corn Laws at a time when no one else anticipated it.  When he himself was charged by his old friends in the Turin Chamber with desertion and treason, he reminded them that the same charges had been made against Peel, but that he was largely compensated by the knowledge that he had saved England from socialist commotions, which in that country were in reality even more threatening in their scope and extent than in the rest of agitated Europe.  He used to say that if Pitt had lived in times of peace he would have been a reformer after the fashion of Peel and Canning, adding his own venturesomeness to the largeness of views of the one and the capable sound sense of the other.

These scattered judgments are drawn from the essays written by Cavour in the years 1843-46.  They appeared in Swiss or French reviews at a period when it was easier to make a reputation by a magazine article than it is now.  Cavour’s monographs attracted attention by the writer’s display of independent thought and firsthand information.  The most interesting now is that on “the condition and future of Ireland,” which has been often referred to in the British Parliament.  Most of the suggestions made in it have been long since carried into effect, but it is not these that make the essay still worth reading:  it is Cavour’s mode of approaching the question.  He writes as what has been lately called an “Imperialist,” though it was formerly thought enough to say “Englishman.”  It is doubtful if any foreign publicist ever wrote in the same spirit on the relations of England and Ireland either before or since.  It is only necessary to be familiar with the continental press, from Legitimist to Socialist, to know, what he knew himself, that Cavour was almost in a minority of one.  He was not acquainted with a single English politician; no one influenced him; he judged the Irish question from the study of history past and present, and having formed an unpopular opinion, he was prepared to stand by it.  He never held that politics are a game of chance; he believed that they are subject to fixed laws of cause and effect, and he worked out political problems by seeking and applying these laws to the case in point without passion or prejudice.  Having satisfied himself that the union of Ireland and England was for the good of both, he was not disposed to quarrel with the means by which it was accomplished.  When Pitt failed to carry the Bill for the Union through the Irish House of Commons, he resorted to the expedient, “which had never failed in the Dublin Parliament,” of corruption on a large scale.  He bought rotten