di Santa Rosa, once Charles Albert’s friend and later his severest critic, to combat whose indictment the Count d’Auzers had written folios in the French and German newspapers.  At the end of the memorandum Cavour transcribed an extract from Santa Rosa’s work, in which he invoked the advent of an Italian Washington.  Was that the part which Cavour dreamed of playing?  A few years after, he wrote in a fit of despondency, “There was a time when I should have thought it the most natural thing in the world that I should wake up one morning prime minister of a kingdom of Italy.”  The words written in 1832 throw a flood of light on the subjects of his boyish dreams and the goal of his prophetic ambition.

The story repeated by most of Cavour’s biographers, that in putting off the page’s uniform he uttered some scornful words which, reported to Charles Albert, changed the goodwill of that prince into hostility, rests on doubtful authority; but it seems to be true that Charles Albert, who began by being very well disposed to the son and nephew of his friends, calling him in one letter “the interesting youth who justifies such great hopes,” and in another, “ce charmant Camille,” came to consider his quondam protege a restless spirit, inconvenient in the present and possibly dangerous in the future.  Though the schoolboy essay above mentioned was kept a secret, the liberal heresies of the young lieutenant were well enough known.  He was told that he would bring father and mother in sorrow to the grave, and he was even threatened with banishment to America.  The police watched his movements.  He wrote to his Swiss uncle that he had no right to complain as he was liberal and very liberal and desired a complete change in the whole system.  On Charles Albert’s accession to the throne he was sent to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard; but it appears that not the king (as he supposed) but his own father suggested the step.  Cavour saw in the idleness and apathy of garrison life in this lonely place a type of the disease from which the whole State was suffering.  He wrote to the Count de Sellon, the apostle of universal peace, that much as he abhorred bloodshed, he could think of no cure but war.  “The Italians need regeneration; their moral, which was completely corrupted under the ignoble dominion of Spaniards and Austrians, regained a little energy under the French regime, and the ardent youth of the country sighs for a nationality; but to break entirely with the past, to be born anew to a better state, great efforts are necessary and sacrifices of all kinds must remould the Italian character.  An Italian war would be a sure pledge that we were going to become again a nation, that we were rising from the mud in which we have been trampled for so many centuries.”