In England he studied the then new Poor Laws; even before he started on his first travels, he decided to inquire into the position of the poorest classes in the countries he visited. He recognised that the acknowledgment of the prescriptive right of every member of the community to food and shelter was the first step to vast changes in social legislation. Cavour's natural inclinations were more those of a social and economic reformer than of the political innovator. Gasworks, factories, hospitals, and prisons were in turn inspected. Cavour went thoroughly into the questions of prison labour and diet. He did not object to the treadmill in itself, but thought unfruitful labour demoralising. Useful work with a small gain reformed the convict. The prison fare seemed to him rather too good. He was impressed by the bread "as good as the best that is consumed in the clubs." Probably, next to the policeman, what impresses the thinking foreigner most in the British Isles is the Englishman's loaf of white bread. It might appear that in his close study of utilitarian England, Cavour missed the greater England of imagination and adventure, of genius and energy. It is true that he did homage at the shrine of Shakespeare by a visit to Stratford-on-Avon, and that he declared that there was no sight in the world equal to the Life Guards on their superb black horses. But his real appreciation of the greatness of England is not to be looked for in the jottings of the tourist; it stands forth conspicuously in his few but singularly weighty early political writings. The English politician whom he most admired was Pitt. The preference was striking in a young man who was considered a dangerous liberal in his own country. It showed amongst other things an adoption of an English standpoint in appraising English policy which is rare in a foreigner. "In attacking France," Cavour wrote, "Pitt preserved social order in England, and kept civilisation in the paths of that regular and gradual progress which it has followed ever since." He said of him: "He loved power not as an end but as a means"—words which long after he applied to himself: "You know that I care nothing for power as power; I care for it only as a means to compass the good of my country."
Cavour had the cast of mind which admires in others its own qualities. As he revered Pitt's "vast and puissant intelligence," so he sympathised with Peel's logic and courage. Peel was his favourite among his contemporaries; he called him "the statesman who more than any other had the instinct of the necessity of the moment." He foretold Peel's abolition of the Corn Laws at a time when no one else anticipated it. When he himself was charged by his old friends in the Turin Chamber with desertion and treason, he reminded them that the same charges had been made against Peel, but that he was largely compensated by the knowledge that he had saved England from socialist commotions, which in that country were in reality even more threatening in their scope and extent than in the rest of agitated Europe. He used to say that if Pitt had lived in times of peace he would have been a reformer after the fashion of Peel and Canning, adding his own venturesomeness to the largeness of views of the one and the capable sound sense of the other.
These scattered judgments are drawn from the essays written by Cavour in the years 1843-46. They appeared in Swiss or French reviews at a period when it was easier to make a reputation by a magazine article than it is now. Cavour's monographs attracted attention by the writer's display of independent thought and firsthand information. The most interesting now is that on "the condition and future of Ireland," which has been often referred to in the British Parliament. Most of the suggestions made in it have been long since carried into effect, but it is not these that make the essay still worth reading: it is Cavour's mode of approaching the question. He writes as what has been lately called an "Imperialist," though it was formerly thought enough to say "Englishman." It is doubtful if any foreign publicist ever wrote in the same spirit on the relations of England and Ireland either before or since. It is only necessary to be familiar with the continental press, from Legitimist to Socialist, to know, what he knew himself, that Cavour was almost in a minority of one. He was not acquainted with a single English politician; no one influenced him; he judged the Irish question from the study of history past and present, and having formed an unpopular opinion, he was prepared to stand by it. He never held that politics are a game of chance; he believed that they are subject to fixed laws of cause and effect, and he worked out political problems by seeking and applying these laws to the case in point without passion or prejudice. Having satisfied himself that the union of Ireland and England was for the good of both, he was not disposed to quarrel with the means by which it was accomplished. When Pitt failed to carry the Bill for the Union through the Irish House of Commons, he resorted to the expedient, "which had never failed in the Dublin Parliament," of corruption on a large scale. He bought rotten boroughs; he was prodigal of places, honours, pensions, and at the end of a year he obtained a majority of 168 votes against 73. Was he wrong? Cavour thought not, though he found no words strong enough to condemn the men who sold their conscience for place or gold. Public opinion, he said, has always sanctioned in governments the use of a different morality from that binding on individuals. In all ages an extreme indulgence has been shown towards immoral acts which brought about great political results. He conceded, for the sake of argument, that such indulgence might be a fatal error; but he insisted that if Pitt's character was to be blackened because he used parliamentary corruption, the same censure ought in justice to be extended to the greatest monarchs of past times, Louis XIV., Joseph II., Frederic the Great, who, to serve their own ends, outraged the immovable principles of humanity and morality in a far graver manner than could be laid to the charge of the illustrious statesman who consolidated the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
On Cavour's own grounds, those of expediency, it might be objected that a bargain which on one side you allow to be discreditable leaves the legacy of an indestructible desire on that side to wipe out the discredit by tearing it up. Though Cavour became great by his connection with a movement which, before all things, was swayed by sentiment, he never entirely recognised the part that sentiment plays in politics. He blamed O'Connell for demanding repeal, which, even if possible to obtain, would do as much harm to Ireland as to England, instead of supporting measures that would remove all cause for Irish discontent. Had he lived long enough he would have seen all those measures passed, but he would not have seen the end to Irish discontent. This might have surprised him, but not so much as to see a great English party advocating disunion, which, he declared, could be logically supported only "by those who thought it desirable that there should be a revolution."
Cavour noticed and deplored the unpopularity of England on the Continent. Extreme parties, opposed in everything else, were agreed in a violent hatred of that country. The moderate party liked it in theory, but in reality they had no natural sympathy with it. Only a few individuals who rose superior to the passions of the multitude felt the esteem due to a nation which had powerfully contributed to develop the moral and material resources of the world, and whose mission was far from ended. The masses were almost everywhere hostile to it. It was a mistake to suppose that this was the feeling of France alone; it might be expressed more loudly there, but it was, in fact, universal. The enemies of progress and the partisans of political subversion looked on England as their worst adversary: the former charged her with being the hotbed of revolutionary propagandism; the latter, perhaps with more reason, considered the English aristocracy as the corner-stone of the social edifice of Europe. England ought to be popular with the friends of gradual reform and regular progress, but a host of prejudices, recollections, passions, produced the contrary effect. With but little alteration the lines here condensed might have been written to-day.
A book on railways by Count Petitti had been prohibited in Piedmont. That railways were connected with the Powers of Darkness was then a general opinion, shared in particular by Pope Gregory. Cavour reviewed the book in the Revue nouvelle, which was also prohibited, but sundry copies of it were smuggled into Italy, and one even reached the king. While Petitti had avoided all political allusions, Cavour's article abounds in them: railways would promote the moral union of Italy, which must precede the conquest of national independence. Municipal jealousies, intellectual backwardness, would disappear, and, when that happened, nothing could prevent the accomplishment of the object which was the passionate desire of all—emancipation. A very small number of ideas forms the intellectual hinge of man in the aggregate; of these patriotism is only second in importance to religion. Any conception of national dignity in the masses was impossible without the pride of nationality. Every private interest, every political dissension, should be laid aside that Italian independence might become a fact. Cavour always spoke of Italy—not of Piedmont, not of Lombardy and Venetia. Rome, still of all cities the richest in precious memories and splendid hopes, would be the centre of an iron network uniting the whole peninsula. Some well-intentioned patriots objected to the increase of railway communication with Austria from the fear that it would strengthen her military and political hold over her Italian provinces. Cavour answered that the great events at hand could not be delayed by the shortening of the number of hours between Vienna and Milan. On the other hand, when the relations arising out of conquest were replaced by those of friendship and equity, rapid communication would promote the moral and intellectual intercourse, "which, more than any one, we desire," between grave and profound Germany and intelligent Italy. In these pages Cavour foreshadowed the boring of the Alps and the German alliance, two facts which then seemed equally improbable.
The man was made; he waited for his opportunity. What if it never came? Can we conceive Cavour's immense energy limited to a rice-field? Are there really men whom their lot forbids—
Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes?
The prophet may cry aloud in the desert, the scientific discoverer may guess at truths which his age rejects, but the total waste of such a force as the mind of Cavour seems less easy to imagine than that his appearance was a sign that the times were ripe for him.