Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/286

Rh 274 C A V U R relieved of the honour, and marked as a dangerous fellow. During his brief military career he seems to have been stationed mostly at Genoa. This was a more independent life than he had hitherto led ; and at Genoa, where the liberal element was naturally stronger than at the court and capital, young Cavour felt himself more at his ease than ever he had been at Turin. But when the shock of the French Revolution of the year 1830 began to be felt in Italy, and when men thought themselves at liberty once more to express their opinions on the state of their native country, Cavour was soon caught offending by the same excessive freedom of speech. He was sent, therefore, in a kind of honourable banishment to Fort Bard in the Val d Aosta, nominally to superintend some mason- work there, but really as a chastisement for his imprudence, and in the hope of a course of solitary reflection leading him at last to acquiesce in the existing state of things. Here Cavour was reduced to great straits for want of society, being obliged to while away his time at a certain game of tarots with the con tractors. After BIX months he grew weary of it, and sent in his resignation (1831). He had now reached a most important turning-point in his career. Set adrift from the profession for which he had been educated, and suspected at court, there were three courses open to him, to retire into private life in Piedmont, or to go abroad and quietly await a favourable opportunity for taking part in the deliverance of his country, or to join in the frequent conspiracies of the Carbonari and others for its immediate emancipation. The state of Italy was such as to justify the most extreme methods. He was now arrived at a time of life at which he could realize the full measure of the sufferings and humiliations his country had undergone. Endowed with the all too fatal gift of beauty, and covered with a population, which has excelled in every department of human activity, in arts and literature, in commerce and navigation, but was too disunited and far too demoralized to defend her, Italy had for centuries been the prey of every spoiler, of the Saracen and the German, the Frenchman and the Spaniard. Her national life had been repressed, her commerce ruined, her intellectual growth stifled, and the very soul of her people debased and per verted by priestcraft and foreign despotism. To most other nations their native land was an object of pride and affection, to the Italians Italy was the theme of shame and burning tears. The entrance of the armies of Republican France into Italy had been greeted as the dawn of deliverance, but in a little time their deliverers proved themselves to be only new masters. Yet the French occupa tion had the good effect of diffusing the liberal ideas of the French thinkers, and of accustoming the Italians to a comparatively just and well-ordered government, so that the desire for national regeneration became more ardent than ever. Then came the Peace of Vienna, which gave Austria direct or indirect rule over the whole of Italy, and in 1820 the rising in Naples and Piedmont, which furnished that power with the pretext of armed intervention, and the excuse for rivetting still faster the chains of the enslaved. At this period, then, the prospects of Italian liberty seemed darker than ever. Even Sardinia, though preserved from the worst reactionary extreme by the hatred of Austria, had been compelled to yield to the prevailing current. Charles Albert himself, the leader of the rising in Piedmont in 1821, was fain to atone for his liberal courses by joining in the worst measures of the reaction, and, when he ascended the throne in 1831, was instructed that he held his place only on his good behaviour. In fact, from the beginning of his reign to 1847, when the revolution re commenced, he was only the nominal ruler of Sardinia ; his ministers were the creatures of Austria, and received their instructions from Metternich. It is necessary to remember these circumstances if we are to appreciate rightly the services of Cavour. We must compare the Italy he has made not with countries which have for centuries had a free development of their national life, but with Italy of 1820 or 1830, with Italy oppressed, demoralized, and disunited, while the noblest of her sons languished in Austrian prisons, or fretted their lives away in exile or in vain conspiracy. In these circumstances, Cavour, a youth of twenty, might have been led to join the secret societies which, under the direction chiefly of Mazzini, waged ceaseless war against the oppressors of Italy. From this his good sense happily saved him. Though prophetically aware of the near advent of democracy as the ruling power in the world, he saw that conspiracies could not deliver Italy, that fitful plots backed by irregular bands were useless against a regular Government supported by veteran armies, and that fretful outbreaks would only irritate Austria and excuse further oppression without doing her any real injury. Being, therefore, unable to tolerate the policy of the clerical and aristocratic party of the time, and entirely disapproving of the methods of the Carbonari and &quot; Young Italy,&quot; he saw that the best course in politics was a watchful inactivity. For sixteen years he was obliged to wait in private life, a keen and patient observer, acquiring that ripe and com prehensive wisdom which should fit him to be an effective servant of his country. During these long years we find him active in three special ways, as the skilful promoter of the material interests of his country, especially in agriculture, as a keen student and observer of foreign countries, especially France and England, and as the author of papers in which he embodied some of the results of his observations. Though, at first, it is said, he could scarcely distinguish between a cabbage and a turnip, he soon made himself complete master of the theory and practice of agriculture, introduced vast improvements on the family estates, and was one of the founders of the Agricultural Society of Piedmont in 1841. So in the application of steam to material and social improvement, in establishing steamers on the Lake Maggiore, in the erection of steam-mills and chemical works, and in the furtherance of railways, as well as in founding the Bank of Turin, he took a leading part. These were good in themselves, but Cavour had a patriotic end in view ; he knew that they were the sure basis of national and social improvement, and the best possible introduction to it. In his study of foreign countries, though he had an open, penetrating eye for all phases of their national life, it was with the same continual reference to the good of Italy that he observed and meditated. He was several times at Paris, and at least twice in England, and was perfectly familiar with the language and economic and political condition both of England and of France. Such French statesmen as Guizot and the Due de Broglie he highly esteemed ; and he was always an ardent, though by no means unqualified, admirer of England. In the early part of his public career, when his opposition to the revolu tionary fanaticism made him unpopular, the charge of Anglomania was frequently brought against him. During these years, too, he wrote various reviews, all of which give the results of studies bearing on the economic or political questions of the time, and bear, all of them, the impress of that practical moderation and penetration which were such essential elements in his character. These sixteen years were in every sense the training time of Cavour. Under the combined influence of practical experience in the conduct of business, and of philosophic insight into the principles of free government, as exhibited especially in England, he grew into that capable man who should guide Italy through the troubles of a very