Cavour was not re-elected when Parliament was dissolved in January 1849; he was therefore not in the Chamber during the debates which preceded and followed the last desperate throw of Novara.  A letter written by him six days after the battle shows what he thought of those events.  The Conservative party, he says, which represented the great majority in the country, had been badly supported by it (an assertion as true now as then).  The king threw himself into the arms of demagogues who thought that freedom and independence were to be won by phrases and proclamations.  The army had been disheartened, the best officers kept inactive; twelve months’ sacrifices of men and money placed them in a worse condition than before the Milan revolution.  Self-love might, he concluded, warp his judgment, but he had the intimate conviction that, if he had held the reins of power, he could have saved the country without any effort of genius, and planted the Italian flag on the Styrian Alps.  But his friends joined with his foes to keep him out of power, and he had passed his time in deploring faults which it would have been very easy to avoid.

Remembering what Cavour afterwards accomplished, these are words which should not be set lightly aside.  Yet it is possible that the complete disaster into which Charles Albert rushed at Novara was the only thing to save the country and to lay the foundations of Italian unity.  The king was more eager for war than the most unthinking democrat.  Reviled by all parties, he sought the great conciliator, death.  “The Italians will never trust me,” he exclaimed.  “My son, Victor, will be king of Italy, not I.”  When the death he would have chosen was denied him, he went away, a crownless exile.  He could do no more.

It was necessary, as Charles Albert had seen, that the king who was to carry out the destinies of Italy should be trusted.  Victor Emmanuel came to the throne with few advantages; he was unpopular, his private friends were said to be reactionaries, his brusque manners offended most people.  He had practically no advisers in these critical moments, but the moral courage with which he refused the Austrian offers of lenient terms if he would repudiate the Statute and his father’s word, won for him the nation’s trust, which he never lost.  Cavour, with all his genius, could not have made the kingdom of Italy if the Italians had doubted their king.

CHAPTER IV

IN PARLIAMENT

The condition of Italy, Cavour said, was worse at the end of the year’s struggle than at the beginning.  Such was the case, if the present only were looked at.  When Austria resumed her sway in Lombardy and Venetia she resumed it by the right of the conqueror, a more intelligible, and in a sense a more legitimate, right than that derived from bargains and treaties in which the population had no voice.  The House of Hapsburg was saved in Italy by one loyal servant,