whereas Charles Albert represented only the party of reaction which was with him in his absolutism but not in his patriotism.  He was accused of having changed sides, but, even allowing his complicity in the movement of 1821 to have been greater than he admitted, it is plain that the one thing which drew him into that movement was its championship of Italian independence.  Unlike the Neapolitan revolutionists who disclaimed adventures for the freeing of Italy, at least till they had made sure of their own freedom, the liberals of Piedmont rose with the avowed purpose of rushing into an immediate war with Austria.  A madder scheme was never devised, but the madness of one day is often the wisdom of the next.  In politics really disinterested acts bear fruit, whatever be their consequences to individuals.

The question which agitated all minds in 1847 was whether or not Charles Albert could be gained to the liberal cause.  Many despaired, for by many even his Italian ambition was denied.  Cavour had no favourable opinion of the king, but it was one of his theories that erroneous ideas always yield in the end to facts.  He believed that Charles Albert’s support could be secured if he were fully persuaded that the interests of his dynasty were not imperilled.  He was not afraid, as others were, that even after the first surrender the wavering mind of the king would make retrogression probable; he understood that, if reforms were more difficult to obtain in Piedmont than elsewhere, they would be more durable when obtained.  At last a concession of real value was wrung from the king:  the censure was revoked.  Cavour saw that the press, which till then had been a cipher, would instantly become of vast importance.  He left his retirement to found a newspaper, to which he gave the name by which the Italian movement will be known in history—­Il Risorgimento.  He was not a born journalist, but he set himself with his usual determination to learn the art.  In after times he said that the experience gained in a newspaper office was almost as profitable to him as the knowledge of mathematics.  Count Cesare Balbo was asked by Cavour to write the prospectus of the new journal, in which its aims were described as Independence, union between the princes and people, and reforms.  Cavour’s name appeared as acting and responsible editor.

Balbo’s work, Le Speranze d’Italia, had lately created an impression, only second to that made by the Primato of Gioberti.  Practical men like Cavour preferred the simple programme which Balbo put forward—­the liberation of Italy from foreign yoke before all things—­to Gioberti’s mystical outpourings, much as they pleased the general.  Gioberti, once a follower of Mazzini, and afterwards a priest, imagined a United Italy, with the Pope at its head, which, to unthinking souls, seemed to be on the road to miraculous realisation when the amiable and popular Cardinal Mastai Feretti was invested with the tiara.  Cavour never had any hope in the Papacy as a political institution.