Cavour’s death caused a profound sensation in Europe, and in Italy and in England awakened great sorrow.  Hardly any public man has received so splendid a tribute as that rendered to his memory in the British Houses of Parliament.  The same words were on the lips of all:  What would Italy do without him?  Death is commonly the great reminder that no man is necessary.  Nations fulfil their destinies even though their greatest sons be laid under the turf.  And Italy has fulfilled her destinies, but there are Italians who believe that had Cavour lived to complete his task, although his dream of an Eirenicon might never have been realised, their country would not have passed through the selva selvaggia of mistakes and humiliations into which she now entered.

CHAPTER XVII

ROME OR DEATH

1861-1864

Cavour’s Successors—­Aspromonte—­The September Convention—­Garibaldi’s
Visit to England.

There were two possible successors to Cavour, the Tuscan, Bettino Ricasoli, and Urban Rattazzi, a Piedmontese barrister.  The first belonged to the right, the second to the left centre in the Parliamentary combinations.  Cavour had no very close personal relations with either, but he knew their characters.  Rattazzi formerly held ministerial office under him, and the long Tuscan crisis of 1859, looked at, as he looked at it, from the inside, gave him opportunities of judging the Iron Baron who opposed even his own will on more than one occasion in that great emergency.  Ricasoli was rigid, frigid, a frequenter of the straightest possible roads; Rattazzi, supple, accommodating, with an incorrigible partiality for umbrageous by-ways.  He was already an ‘old parliamentary hand,’ and in the future, through a series of ministerial lapses, any one of which would have condemned most men to seclusion, he preserved his talent for manufacturing majorities and holding his party together.  Choosing between these two candidates, Cavour before he died gave his preference to Ricasoli, who was charged by the King with the formation of a ministry in which he took the Treasury and the Foreign Office.

Ricasoli was without ambition, and he rather under than over-rated his abilities, but he went to work with considerable confidence in his power of setting everything right.  A perfectly open and honest statesman ought to be able, he imagined, to solve the most difficult problems.  Why not, except that the world is not what it ought to be?  In home politics he offended the Party of Action by telling them plainly that if they broke the law they would have to pay the cost, and he offended his own party by refusing to interfere with the right of meeting or any other constitutional right of citizens, whether they were followers of Mazzini or of anybody else, as long as they kept within legal bounds.  He wrote an elaborate letter to Pius IX., in which he sought to persuade the Pontiff of the sweet reasonableness