getting it would not be very long delayed; meanwhile, as not one of his political friends believed in its possibility, the cause would only be injured were it known that he had direct dealings with the men who were working for it.  He was willing to receive La Farina whenever he liked, but on the understanding that he came in the morning before it was light, and that, if Parliament or diplomacy got wind of their relations, he should reply that he knew nothing about him.  The interviews took place almost daily for four years, without any one knowing of them.  Some hours before dawn La Farina ascended the narrow secret staircase which led directly to Cavour’s bedroom, and he was gone when the city awakened.  In spite of the almost melodramatic complexion of these secret meetings, it must not be supposed, as some have supposed, that Cavour pulled the wires of all the conspiracies in Italy.  His visitor kept him informed of the progress made, the propaganda carried on, but he rarely interfered.  He still thought that his own business was to make Piedmont an object-lesson in constitutional monarchy, and to get the Austrians out of Italy.  That done, the country, left to itself, must decide whether it would unite or not.

After the Congress of Paris, Cavour took the Foreign Office in addition to the Ministry of Finance.  He could not trust either of these departments to other hands; and the country approved, for the conviction gained ground that, whether he was mad or not, only he could extricate it from the situation into which he had drawn it.  When one senator called him a dictator, he retorted that, if Parliament refused him its support, he should go away, which was not the habit of dictators.  But the mere threat of resignation brought the most recalcitrant to reason.  Thus he continued to obtain large sums to carry out the works he deemed necessary, one of the greatest of which was the transfer of the arsenal from Genoa to Spezia—­a step which angered the Genoese on one side, and on the other the old conservatives, who asked what had little Piedmont to do with big fleets?  “But the fact was,” Count Solaro said with a sneer, “the Prime Minister had all Italy in view, and was preparing for the future kingdom.”  Cavour also forced Parliament to vote the supplies required for undertaking the boring of Mont Cenis, which most of the deputies expected would be a total failure.  In proposing this vote he declared that they must advance or perish.  He was delighted with a phrase with which Lord Palmerston concluded a congratulatory letter sent to the Sardinian legation in London, and written in elegant Italian:  “Henceforth no one will talk of the works of the ancient Romans.”  This little episode wiped out the last traces of misunderstanding between the two statesmen, who became again what fate had meant them to be, friends and fellow-workers.  Cavour’s budgets had the inherent defect that they continued to show increased expenditure and a deficit, but no minister who had lacked the power