This little story was related to Lord Palmerston, in whom it fanned the fuel of the indignation roused by Mr. Gladstone’s Letters, of which he had written that “they revealed a system of illegality, injustice, and cruelty which one would not have imagined possible nowadays in Europe.”  But he employed still stronger language against the Austrians, whose method of reimposing their rule in Lombardy had lost them all their friends in England, for the time at least, and had worked their foes up to the point of fury.  Those were the days when they sang at Vienna: 

  Hat der Teufel einen Sohn,
  So ist er sicher Palmerston.

Lord Palmerston was coming to a conclusion about Italian matters; it was this:  that, great as were the objections to the deliverance of Italy from the Austrians by French aid, yet it would be better for her to be delivered so than not at all.  The same conclusion had been reached by Cavour, except that he would not have admitted unending servitude to be the alternative; he was too patriotic and too resourceful for that.  He kept in view other contingencies:  European complications, the organic disruption of Austria, even at that early date, the foundation of a German empire.  But in 1851, as in 1859, the aid of France was the one means of shaking off the Austrian yoke, which was morally certain to succeed For him, however, the French alliance was only a speck in the distance.  He did not think, as Lord Palmerston seems to have thought, that a French liberating army might be “very soon” expected in the Lombard plains.  When Louis Napoleon swept away the impediments between himself and the Imperial throne, Cavour was less moved by the violence of the act than by the hope that its consequences might be favourable to Italy.  The Prince-President tranquilly awaited the eight million votes which should transform him from a political brigand into a legitimised emperor, and Cavour left him to the judgment of his own countrymen.  He saw no need to be more severe than they.  It is easy to conceive a higher morality, but as yet it has not been applied to politics.  As Cavour remarked, “Franklin sought the help of the most despotic monarch in Europe,” and the analogies in recent history do not require to be recalled.

An inferior statesman who, like Cavour, contemplated foreign aid as an ultimate resource, would have lost his interest and slackened his activity in home politics.  It was not so with him.  Before all other things he placed the necessity of consolidating Piedmont as a constitutional State, and of preparing her morally and materially to take her part in the struggle when it came.  If that were not done, a new Bonaparte might indeed cross the Alps in the character of liberator, but a free Italy would be no more the result of his intervention than it had been of his uncle’s.  Cavour was meditating the stroke of policy which gave him the power to carry out this work of consolidation and preparation.  He ruled the ministry, but he