Piedmont needed some years, not of rest, but of active and consecutive labour before it could enter the lists again as armed champion of Italian independence.  The disastrous issue of the last conflicts had been attributed to every cause except that which was most accountable for it:  a badly led and badly organised army.  The “We are betrayed” theory was caught up alike by republicans and conservatives, who accused each other of ruining the country rather than give the victory to the rival faction.  Whatever grain of truth there was in these taunts, the military inefficiency of the forces which Charles Albert led across the Ticino in March 1848 remained the main reason why Radetsky was able to get back Lombardy and Venetia for his master.  This Cavour knew, and he was anxious not to precipitate matters till La Marmora, to whom he privately gave carte blanche, could say that his work was done.  He began treating Austria with more consideration than she had received from Massimo d’Azeglio, who was a bad hand at dissembling.  Count Buol was gratified, almost grateful.  But these relatively harmonious relations did not last long.  In February 1853 there was an abortive attempt at revolution in Milan, of which not one person in a thousand knew anything till it was suppressed.  It was the premature and ill-advised explosion of a conspiracy by which Mazzini hoped to repeat the miracle of 1848:  the ejection of a strong military power by a blast of popular fury.  But miracles are not made to order, though Mazzini never came to believe it.  As a reprisal for this disturbance, the Austrian Government, not content with executions and bastinadoes, decreed the sequestration of the lands of those Lombard emigrants who had become naturalised in Piedmont.  Cavour charged Austria with a breach of international law and recalled the Sardinian minister from Vienna.  It was risking war, but he knew that even for the weakest state there are some things worse than war.  It was reversing the policy of prudence with which he had set out, but when prudence meant cowardice, Cavour always cast it to the winds.  The outcry in all Europe against the sequestration decree deterred the Austrian Government from treating the Sardinian protest as a casus belli.  Liberal public opinion everywhere approved of Cavour’s course, and in France and England increased confidence was felt in him by those in authority.  Governments like to deal with a strong man who knows when not to fear.

Only such a man would have conceived the idea which was now taking concrete form in Cavour’s mind.  This was the plan of an armed alliance with the Western Powers on the outbreak of the war, which as early as November 1853 well-informed persons looked upon as henceforth inevitable.  Cavour would never have been a Chauvinist, but he was not by nature a believer in neutrality.  He was constitutionally inclined to think that in all serious contingencies to act is safer than not to act.  The world is