True to his role of mystification, one week after the shot fired on the 1st of January, Napoleon inserted an official statement in the Moniteur to the effect that, although public opinion had been agitated by alarming rumours, there was nothing in the foreign relations of France to justify the fears these rumours tended to create.  He continued on this tack, with more or less consistency, to the very verge of the outbreak of hostilities.  ‘The Empire was peace,’ as it was always announced to be in the intervals when it was not war; there was no more harmless dove in Europe than the person enthroned in the Tuileries.  These assurances were given more credence than they deserved by the Conservative Cabinet then in power in England, and the British ministers believed to the last that war would be averted, to which end they strained every nerve.  Besides the wish felt by every English government to preserve European peace, there was at this juncture, not only in the Cabinet, but in the country, so much fear of Napoleon’s ambition and restlessness, that for the time being, sympathy with Italy was relegated to a second place.

Meanwhile there was no want of plainness in the language employed in Piedmont.  In opening the second session of the sixth Sardinian Parliament, Victor Emmanuel pronounced, on 10th January, the historic phrase declaring that he could not remain insensible to the cry of grief, il grido di dolore, that reached him from all parts of Italy.  Every corner of the fair country where the Si sounds was electrified.  The words, as has since become known, were introduced into the speech by the King himself.  As Cavour had foreseen, Austria played into his hands.  To Lord Malmesbury’s appeal to evacuate the Roman Legations, and to use Austrian influence with the Italian princes in procuring the concession of necessary reforms, Count Buol replied in terms that were the reverse of obliging:  ’We do not mean to abdicate our right of intervention, and if we are called upon to help the Italian sovereigns with our arms, we shall do so.  We shall not recommend their governments to undertake any reforms.  France plays the part of protectress of nationalities; we are, and shall be, protectors of dynastic rights.’  Finally, England proposed a congress with a view to general disarmament.  Piedmont, counting on the madness of her adversary, risked agreement with this plan.  Austria gave a peremptory refusal to have anything to do with it.

Cavour now asked Parliament to vote a war loan of L2,000,000, which was passed by a majority of 81 out of 151 votes.  No foreign banker would undertake to negotiate the loan, but it was twice covered by Italian buyers, nearly all small capitalists, who put their money into it as a patriotic duty.  Amongst the few deputies who opposed the loan was the old apostle of retrogression, Count Solaro della Margherita, who raised his solitary voice against the tide of revolution;