During the journey from Turin to Genoa, Garibaldi was occupied in opening, reading and tearing up into small pieces an enormous mass of letters, while his English companion spent the time in vainly speculating as to what this vast correspondence was about.  When they approached Genoa, the floor of the railway carriage resembled a gigantic wastepaper basket.  It was only afterwards that Lawrence Oliphant guessed the letters to be responses to a call for volunteers for Sicily.

The origin of the Sicilian expedition has been related in various ways; there is the version which attributes it entirely to Cavour, and the version which attributes it to not irresponsible personages in England.  The former was the French and Clerical official account; the latter has always obtained credence in Germany and Russia.  For instance, the late Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg said that ’the mystery of how 150,000 men were vanquished by a thousand Red-shirts was wrapped in English bank-notes!’ Of this theory, it need only be said that the notion of Lord Palmerston (for it comes to that) supporting a foreign revolution out of the British exchequer is not one that commends itself to the belief of the average Englishman.  With regard to the other theory—­namely, that Cavour ‘got up’ the Sicilian expedition, it has been favoured to a certain degree, both by his friends and foes; but it will not bear careful examination.  As far as Sicily goes (Naples is another thing), the most that can be brought home to Cavour is a complicity of toleration; and even this statement should be qualified by the addition, ‘after the act.’  It is true that, in the early days after Villafranca, he had exclaimed:  ’They have cut me off from making Italy from the north, by diplomacy; very well, I will make her from the south, by revolution!’ True, also, that earlier still, in 1856, he expressed the opinion, shared by every man of common sense, that while the Bourbons ruled over the Two Sicilies there would be no real peace for Italy.  Nevertheless, in April 1860, he neither thought the time ripe for the venture nor the means employed adequate for its accomplishment.  He was afraid that Garibaldi would meet with the death of the Bandieras and Pisacane.  No one was more convinced than Cavour of the importance of Garibaldi’s life to Italy; and it is a sign of his true superiority of mind that this conviction was never entertained more strongly than at the moment when the general was passionately inveighing against him for the cession of Nice.  To Cavour such invectives seemed natural, and even justified from one point of view; they excited in him no bitterness, and he was only too happy that they fell upon himself and not upon the King, since it was his fixed idea that, without the maintenance of a good understanding between Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, Italy would not be made.  Few men under the sting of personal attacks have shown such complete self-control.