Russia, through her ambassador, intimated that she would regard the crossing of the Ticino as a casus belli. The threat made less impression at Turin than the warnings of Sir Ralph Abercromby; it was the possibility of English intervention, therefore, that Cavour went on to examine.  The Anglomane “Milord Risorgimento” was less surprised at the current of English official thought than were his radical critics, but would any English minister, he asked, enter on a European war to prevent the liberation of Italy, which was an object sacred in the eyes of the mass of the English people?  He believed it to be impossible, but were it so, so be it!  England would have against her a mighty coalition, not of princes, as in former days, but of peoples, in the old world and in the new.  Victory in such a matricidal strife would be as fatal to the first-born of liberty as defeat.

Thus Cavour was prepared to fight Austria, Russia, and England.  The division of parties at that time was in its essence the division of those who were willing to accept a republican solution and those who were not.  It does not follow that all the liberals wished for a republic, but they would all have taken office under it.  Of this there is little doubt.  Cavour never would have become a republican any more than an absolutist minister.  But he saw what the other conservatives failed to see, that the dynasty of Savoy could only live if it led.

On March 22, Charles Albert was still assuring the Austrian Ambassador that his intentions were pacific.  Next day Cavour’s article appeared, and in the evening the king decided for instant war.  Only two of the ministers assented at once; the others gave in after a long discussion.  War was declared on the 25th.  Time lost cannot be recalled; the happy moment had been let go by; Piedmont went not to Lombardy engaged in a dangerous struggle, but to Lombardy victorious.  Cavillers said that the king had come to eat the fruits others had gathered.  Confidence in the ultimate result reached the point of madness, but with revolution stalking through the streets of Vienna the Austrian eagle seemed to have lost its talons.  In May 1848, in Austria itself, Lombardy was looked upon as completely lost, and with it the Southern Tyrol as far as Meran, for no one at that period thought of separating this Italian district from Italy; the most sanguine Austrians only hoped to save Venetia.  Radetsky alone expected to save all, because he knew what he could do, and he had judged Sardinian generalship correctly.  Charles Albert’s staff seemed to have but one idea—­to reverse the tactics which had led the first Napoleon to victory on the same ground.