The Genoese, impatient of the extreme slowness with which reforms were meted out, proposed to send a deputation with a petition for a civic guard, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, to whom the delay was attributed, and who were regarded as the worst enemies of the liberal Pope.  The principal editors, with other influential citizens of Turin, met at the Hotel d’Europe to consider how the deputation should be received, and if their demands were to be supported.  The list of the journalists present comprises the best names in the country; it would be difficult to find more distinguished or disinterested pressmen than those who were then writing for the Piedmontese newspapers.  Valerio was there to represent his new journal, Concordia, in which he carried on war to the knife with Cavour.  His high personal character, as well as his talents, made him no inconsiderable opponent.  It was at this meeting that Cavour first entirely revealed himself.  He showed that faith in the prudence of daring which was the keynote to his great strokes of policy.  The demands of the Genoese, he said, were not too large, but too small.  They hit wide of the mark, and the second of them was idle, because the king, while he remained an absolute prince, was certain not to consent to it.  The government was now neither one thing nor the other; it had lost the authority of an autocracy, and had not gained that of a regime based on the popular will.  The situation was intolerable and dangerous; what was wanted was not this or that reform, but a constitution.

Constitutions seem tame to us now, but to speak of a constitution at Turin on January 18, 1848, was almost as audacious as it would be to speak of it at St. Petersburg at the present time.  Europe stood at the brink of a precipice, but knew it not.  The news had only just spread of the first symptom of revolution—­the rising in Sicily.  Cavour’s speech was a moral bomb-shell.  Most politicians begin by asking for more or less than the measure which finally contents them; those who cried for a republic have been known to put up with a limited monarchy; those who preached the most moderate reforms, at a later stage have danced round trees of liberty.  Cavour asked at once for what he wanted and all that he wanted as far as the internal organisation of the State was concerned.  From first to last he believed that a constitutional monarchy was the only form of government which, in a country like Italy, could combine freedom with order.  Under no narrower system would he accept office, and when in office nothing could make him untrue to his constitutional faith; “no state of siege” was the axiom of his political life.