CHAPTER I HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT

Chapter II
travel-years

Chapter III
the journalist

Chapter IV
in parliament

Chapter V
the great ministry

Chapter VI
the Crimean war—­struggle with the church

Chapter VII
the congress of Paris

Chapter VIII
the pact of Plombieres

Chapter IX
the war of 1859—­Villafranca

Chapter X
Savoy and Nice

Chapter XI
the Sicilian expedition

Chapter XII
the kingdom of Italy

Chapter XIII
Rome voted the capital—­conclusion

CHIEF AUTHORITIES

CHAPTER I

HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT

Nothing is permanent but change; only it ought to be remembered that change itself is of the nature of an evolution, not of a catastrophe.  Commonly this is not remembered, and we seem to go forward by bounds and leaps, or it may be to go backward; in either case the thread of continuity is lost.  We appear to have moved far away from the men of forty years ago, except in the instances in which these men have survived to remind us of themselves.  It is rather startling to recollect that Cavour might have been among the survivors.  He was born on August 10, 1810.  The present Pope, Leo the Thirteenth, was born in the same year.

It was a moment of lull, after the erection and before the collapse of the Napoleonic edifice in Italy.  If no thinking mind believed that edifice to be eternal, if every day did not add to its solidity but took something silently from it, nevertheless it had the outwardly imposing appearance which obtains for a political regime the acceptance of the apathetic and lukewarm to supplement the support of partisans.  Above all, it was a phase in national existence which made any real return to the phase that preceded it impossible.  The air teemed with new germs; they entered even into the mysterious composition of the brain of the generation born in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Environment and heredity do not explain all the puzzle of any single man’s mind and character, but they form co-efficients in the making of him which can be no longer disregarded.  The chief point to be noticed in reference to Cavour is that he was the outcome of a mingling of race which was not only transmitted through the blood, but also was a living presence during his childhood and youth.  His father’s