divided between men of this mould and their opposites.  La Marmora told him that the army, which had made incredible progress considering the state in which it was a short time before, could place in the field a force for which no country would have reason to blush.  If not a great general, the Piedmontese Minister of War might fairly be called a first-class organiser.  For the rest, Cavour believed that the ultimate school of any army is war.  Above all, he believed that this was the hour for a great resolve or a gran rifiuto.  If the House of Savoy stood still with folded arms it might retire into the ranks of small ruling families, which leave the rearrangement of maps to their betters.  It was secretly reported to Cavour that Napoleon III. was beginning to drop enigmatical remarks about Italian affairs, and it was these reports that finally decided him to strain every nerve to make his audacious design a reality.

Russia had broken off diplomatic relations with Sardinia in 1848, and when Victor Emmanuel communicated the death of his father to the Powers, the only one which returned no response was the empire of the Czar.  It would be absurd to adduce this lack of courtesy as an excuse for war; still it gave a slightly better complexion to an attack which the Russian Government was justified in calling “extraordinarily gratuitous.”  Cavour had one person of great importance on his side, the king.  In January 1854 he broached the subject with the tentative inquiry, “Does it not seem to your Majesty that we might find some way of taking part in the war of the Western Powers with Russia?” To which Victor Emmanuel answered simply, “If I cannot go myself I will send my brother.”  But it is not too much to say that the whole country was against him.  The old Savoyard party opposed the war tooth and nail, and from the “Little Piedmont” point of view it was perfectly right.  The radicals, headed by Brofferio, denounced it as “economically reckless, militarily a folly, politically a crime.”  Most of the Lombard emigration thought ill of it, and the heads of the army were lukewarm or contrary; this was not the war they wanted.  The Tuscan romancist Guerrazzi wrote, with unpardonable levity, that republicans ought to rejoice because this was the final disillusion given to Italians by monarchy, limited or not.  One republican, however, Manin, saw in the Italian tricolor displayed with the French and English flags in Paris the first ray of hope that had gladdened his eyes since he left Venice, and Poerio; when he heard of the alliance in his dungeon, “felt his chain grow lighter.”  It seemed as if those who had suffered most for Italy had a clearness of vision denied to the rest.