It needed a more wary hand than D’Azeglio’s to steer out of the troubled waters caused by the ecclesiastical bills, and to put the final touches to the legislation which he, to his lasting honour be it said, had courageously and successfully initiated.  In the autumn of 1852 D’Azeglio resigned, and Cavour was requested by the King to form a ministry.  He was to remain, with short breaks, at the head of public affairs for the nine following years.

At this time the government of Lombardy and Venetia was vested in Field-Marshal Radetsky, with two lieutenant-governors under him, who only executed his orders.  Radetsky resided at Verona.  Politically and economically the two provinces were then undergoing an extremity of misery; the diseases of the vines and the silkworms had reached the point of causing absolute ruin to the great mass of proprietors who, reckoning on having always enough to live on, had not laid by.  Many noble families sank to the condition of peasants.  The taxation was heavier than in any other part of the Austrian Empire; in proof of which it may be mentioned that Lombardy paid 80,000,000 francs into the Austrian treasury, which, had the Empire been taxed equally, would have given an annual total of 1,100,000,000, whereas the revenue amounted to only 736,000,000.  The landtax was almost double what it was in the German provinces.  Italians, however, have a great capacity for supporting such burdens with patience, and it is doubtful whether the material aspect of the case did much to increase their hatred of foreign dominion.  Its moral aspect grew daily worse; the terror became chronic.  The possession of a sheet of printed paper issued by the revolutionary press at Capolago, on the lake of Lugano, was enough to send a man to the gallows.  These old, badly printed leaflets, with no name of author or publisher attached, but chiefly written in the unmistakable style of Mazzini, can still be picked up in the little booksellers’ shops in Canton Ticino, and it is difficult to look at them without emotion.  What hopes were carried by them.  What risks were run in passing them from hand to hand.  Of what tragedies were they not the cause!  In August 1851, Antonio Sciesa, of Milan, was shot for having one such leaflet on his person.  The gendarmes led him past his own house, hoping that the sight of it would weaken his nerve, and make him accept the clemency which was eagerly proffered if he would reveal the names of others engaged in the patriotic propaganda.  ‘Tiremm innanz!’ (’come along’) he said, in his rough Milanese dialect, and marched incorruptible to death.  On a similar charge, Dottesio and Grioli, the latter a priest, suffered in the same year, and early in 1852 the long trial was begun at Mantua of about fifty patriots whose names had been obtained by the aid of the bastinado from one or two unhappy wretches who had not the fortitude to endure.  Of these fifty, nine were executed, among whom were the priests Grazioli and Tazzoli, Count Montanari