boroughs; he was prodigal of places, honours, pensions, and at the end of a year he obtained a majority of 168 votes against 73.  Was he wrong?  Cavour thought not, though he found no words strong enough to condemn the men who sold their conscience for place or gold.  Public opinion, he said, has always sanctioned in governments the use of a different morality from that binding on individuals.  In all ages an extreme indulgence has been shown towards immoral acts which brought about great political results.  He conceded, for the sake of argument, that such indulgence might be a fatal error; but he insisted that if Pitt’s character was to be blackened because he used parliamentary corruption, the same censure ought in justice to be extended to the greatest monarchs of past times, Louis XIV., Joseph II., Frederic the Great, who, to serve their own ends, outraged the immovable principles of humanity and morality in a far graver manner than could be laid to the charge of the illustrious statesman who consolidated the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

On Cavour’s own grounds, those of expediency, it might be objected that a bargain which on one side you allow to be discreditable leaves the legacy of an indestructible desire on that side to wipe out the discredit by tearing it up.  Though Cavour became great by his connection with a movement which, before all things, was swayed by sentiment, he never entirely recognised the part that sentiment plays in politics.  He blamed O’Connell for demanding repeal, which, even if possible to obtain, would do as much harm to Ireland as to England, instead of supporting measures that would remove all cause for Irish discontent.  Had he lived long enough he would have seen all those measures passed, but he would not have seen the end to Irish discontent.  This might have surprised him, but not so much as to see a great English party advocating disunion, which, he declared, could be logically supported only “by those who thought it desirable that there should be a revolution.”

Cavour noticed and deplored the unpopularity of England on the Continent.  Extreme parties, opposed in everything else, were agreed in a violent hatred of that country.  The moderate party liked it in theory, but in reality they had no natural sympathy with it.  Only a few individuals who rose superior to the passions of the multitude felt the esteem due to a nation which had powerfully contributed to develop the moral and material resources of the world, and whose mission was far from ended.  The masses were almost everywhere hostile to it.  It was a mistake to suppose that this was the feeling of France alone; it might be expressed more loudly there, but it was, in fact, universal.  The enemies of progress and the partisans of political subversion looked on England as their worst adversary:  the former charged her with being the hotbed of revolutionary propagandism; the latter, perhaps with more reason, considered the English aristocracy as the corner-stone of the social edifice of Europe.  England ought to be popular with the friends of gradual reform and regular progress, but a host of prejudices, recollections, passions, produced the contrary effect.  With but little alteration the lines here condensed might have been written to-day.