it.  As he once wrote of himself—­moderate in opinion, he was favourable, rather than not, to extreme and audacious means.  However long it may have been before the union of all parts of Italy seemed to Cavour a goal within the range of practical politics (that he always thought it a desirable goal there is not the smallest doubt), there was one, the Tiresias of the old order, who said boldly to the Prime Minister of Piedmont at this very juncture:  You are steering straight to Italian unity.  Solaro de la Margherita, who once declared that “in speaking of kings all who had not sold their consciences were seized with religious terror,” saw what he would not see, more clearly than it was seen by those who would have died to make it true.  Standing on the brink of the past, the old statesman warned back the future.  In the debate on the loan for thirty million francs required to meet the excess in war expenditure (January 14), Count Solaro said:  “The object, Italian unity, is not hidden in the mysteries of the Cabinet; it glimmers out, clear as the light of day, from the concatenation of so many circumstances that I lift the veil of no arcanum in speaking of it; and even if I did, it would be my duty to lift it and warn all concerned of the unwisdom and impropriety of those aspirations.”  Deny it who would, he continued, unity was what was aimed at—­what was laboured for with indefatigable activity.  Italian unity!  How could it sound to the other Italian princes?  What was its real meaning for the Pope?  The unity of Italy could only be achieved either by submitting the whole peninsula to the Roman Pontiff or by depriving him of the temporal power.  And the speaker ended by prophesying, his only prophecy which failed, that this shocking event would not happen in the present century, whatever God might permit in the next.

An unwary minister would have taken up the ball and thrown it back.  Cavour’s presence of mind prompted him to leave it where it lay.  He did not say, “No, we are not working for Italian unity; no, we do not wish to overthrow the Pope.”  He answered that in speaking of the future of Italy it was impossible for a Piedmontese minister to entirely separate his desires, his sympathies, from what he considered his political duty:  hence there was no more slippery ground than that on which, with consummate art, the Deputy Solaro de la Margherita had tried to draw him.  But, he said, he would avail himself of the privilege generally conceded to the ministers of a constitutional government when questions were still pending—­to defer his reply till the case was closed (a guerra finita).

CHAPTER VII

THE CONGRESS OF PARIS