The effect of this peroration was inconceivable. Here was the first word of hope publicly uttered since the débâcle! People in the galleries who had seen Cavour usually silenced by clamour and howls heard the applause with astonishment, and then joined in it. All the ministers rose to shake hands with the speaker. Any other man would have become popular at once, but against Cavour prejudice was too strong for a fleeting success to remove it. From that day, however, he was listened to. He was no longer a quantité négligeable in the politics of Italy or of Europe.
One of the ministers, Count Pietro di Santa Rosa, died within a few months of the bill on the Foro becoming law, and the last sacraments were denied to him because he refused to sign a retractation of the political acts of the cabinet of which he was a member. Cavour was an old friend of Santa Rosa. He was present when he died, and he heard from the Countess the particulars of the distressing scene when the priest in the harshest manner withheld the consolations of religion from the dying man, who was a pious Catholic, but who had the strength of mind even in death not to dishonour himself and his colleagues. Cavour wrote an indignant article in the Risorgimento denouncing the party spite which could cause such cruel anguish under a religious cloak, and the people of Turin became so much excited that if the further indignity of a refusal of Christian burial had been resorted to, as at first seemed probable, the lives of the priests in the city would hardly have been safe. Everything seemed to point to Cavour as Santa Rosa's successor, but Massimo d'Azeglio felt nervous at taking the final step. He was encouraged to it by General La Marmora, the friend of both, who declared that "Camillo was a gran buon diavolo," who would grow more moderate when "with us." Cavour accepted the offered post of Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, but not without making terms. He exacted the retirement of a minister whom he considered incurably timorous, especially in ecclesiastical legislation. The point was yielded, but D'Azeglio said to La Marmora, "We are beginning badly with your buon diavolo." The good Massimo got no comfort from the king: "Don't you see that this man will turn you all out?" Victor Emmanuel casually remarked, or rather he made use of a stronger idiom in his native dialect, which would not well bear translation. The king refrained from opposing the appointment, but he did not pretend that he liked it.
About that time Cavour paid a visit to the Piedmontese shore of the Lago Maggiore, where he made the acquaintance of the author of the Promessi Sposi. Perhaps by reason of his poetic instinct Manzoni expected great things of him from the first. "That little man promises very well," he told the poet Berchet. And he opened his heart to Cavour, telling him that dream of Italian unity which he had always cherished, but which, as he said in his old age, he kept a secret for fear of being thought a madman. They looked across the blue line of water; there, on the other side, was Austria. Had Cavour said what he thought, he would have responded, "That is the first stone to move." But he did not enter upon a discussion; he merely murmured, rubbing his hands, "We shall do something!"
To the end Cavour evoked more ready sympathy among men of the other provinces than among the Piedmontese, although these last came to repose the blind trust in him which the Duke of Wellington's soldiers reposed in their leader—a trust born of the conviction that he would lead to victory. Latterly this was Victor Emmanuel's own way of feeling towards Cavour. Sympathy was always lacking.
On taking office Cavour sold his shares in the agricultural and industrial speculations which he had promoted, with the exception of one company, then not in a flourishing state, and likely to collapse if he withdrew his name. He also severed his connection with the Risorgimento, which had cost him much money and made him many enemies, but he believed that the services rendered by it to the cause of orderly liberty were incalculable. He never regretted his years of work in the antro, the wild beasts' den, as the advanced liberals called the office of the journal, a name gaily adopted by himself. As editor of the Risorgimento he fought his one duel; a scandalous attack on the personal honesty of the writers was made by a Jewish financier in an obscure Nizzard sheet; an encounter with pistols followed in which no one was hurt, but both sides seemed to have aimed in earnest. There is a tragic absurdity in the possible extinction of such a life as Cavour's on so paltry an occasion; yet, in the surroundings in which he moved, he could not have passed over the worthless attack in the silent contempt it deserved without being called a coward. At the conclusion of the duel he walked away, turning his back on his adversary, but no long time elapsed before, as minister, he was taking trouble to obtain for this man some honorific bauble which his vanity coveted.
On taking office, Cavour doubted for a moment his own future, the doubt common to men who reach a position they have waited for too long. In these times, he wrote, politicians were soon used up; probably it would be so with him. But the work of his department dispelled gloomy thoughts: as Minister of Commerce he negotiated treaties with France, England, and Belgium in which a step was made towards realising his favourite theories on free trade. Before long he was also made Minister of the Marine; it was taken for granted that he could do as much work as two or three other men. Though both these offices were secondary, Cavour became insensibly leader of the house. Questions on whatever subject were answered by him, and he was not careful to consult his chief as to the tenor of his replies. Massimo d'Azeglio said with a rueful smile that he was now like Louis Philippe: he ruled, but did not govern. Cavour stated his own opinions, whether they were popular or unpopular, consonant with those of his party or directly opposed to them. A deputy asked Government to interfere with the mode and substance of the teaching in the seminaries. Cavour immediately answered that he would hold such interference to be a most fatal act of absolutism; the person to control the instruction given in the seminaries was the bishop; let bishops play the part of theologians, not of deputies, and let the Government govern, and not play the theologian. Some one pointed out that this was quite at variance with what had been said by the other ministers; Cavour excused himself towards his colleagues, but repeated that the principle was one of supreme importance. He had spoken "less as a minister than as a politician." And he never learnt to speak otherwise until there was a ministry in which (to borrow a once often quoted witticism) all the ministers were called Cavour.
The energy with which Cavour repudiated the idea of interfering with the seminaries is interesting on other grounds. Possibly he was the only continental statesman who ever saw liberty in an Anglo-Saxon light. This is further shown by the policy he advocated in dealing with the Jesuits. He did not like the Society, which he described as a worse scourge to humanity than communism. You must not judge its real nature, he said, by observing it where its position is contested and precarious. Look at it, rather, where it has a loose rein, where it can apply its rules in a logical and consequent manner, where the whole education of youth is in its hands. The result is une génération abâtardie. But the remedy he proposed was not repression. He wished to grant the Jesuits three, four, ten times the liberty they gave to others in the countries under their power. In a free country they could do no harm; they would be always obliged to modify and transform themselves and would never gain a real empire either in the world of politics or intellect The great Pombal, who may be called the Cavour of Portugal, took his conception of a free state from England, like the Italian statesman, but he did not understand that persecution is an unfortunate way of inaugurating liberty. This is what for Cavour was "a principle of supreme importance."
In April 1851 Cavour took the office of Minister of Finance; he had exacted the resignation of his predecessor, Nigra, as the price of his remaining in the Cabinet. The Minister of Public Instruction also resigned owing to disagreements with the now all-powerful member of the Government, and was replaced by a nominee of Cavour's, L.C. Farini, the Romagnol exile, author of Lo Stato Romano, whose appointment was significant from a national point of view, notwithstanding his ultra-conservative opinions. Cavour mentioned that Farini's work had been praised by Mr. Gladstone, "one of the most illustrious statesmen in Europe," at which the Chamber applauded wildly, as Cavour intended it to do. Ever watchful for any sign from abroad which could profit Italy, he was glad of what seemed a chance opportunity to provoke a demonstration in honour of the writer of the Letters to Lord Aberdeen on the Neapolitan prisons, which were just then creating an immense sensation. In Italy Mr. Gladstone was the most popular man of the hour; in France, still calling itself a republic, all parties except the reduced ranks of the advanced liberals were very angry—not with King Bomba, but with his accuser. A harmless cousin of Mr. Gladstone was blackballed in a club in Paris on account of the name he bore. Nobody ever had such a good heart as the king of Naples, Count Walewski went about declaring, in support of which he told Mr. Monckton Milnes that Ferdinand had recently granted his request to pardon three hundred prisoners against whom nothing was proved. "How grateful they must have been," replied the Englishman; "did not they come and thank you for having obtained their deliverance?" Taken off his guard and unconscious of the irony, Walewski made the admission that the three hundred were debarred from the pleasure of paying him a visit because, though pardoned, they were not released!
This little story was related to Lord Palmerston, in whom it fanned the fuel of the indignation roused by Mr. Gladstone's Letters, of which he had written that "they revealed a system of illegality, injustice, and cruelty which one would not have imagined possible nowadays in Europe." But he employed still stronger language against the Austrians, whose method of reimposing their rule in Lombardy had lost them all their friends in England, for the time at least, and had worked their foes up to the point of fury. Those were the days when they sang at Vienna:
Hat der Teufel einen Sohn,
So ist er sicher Palmerston.