ot vicious. The vigorous if turbulent life of the Middle Ages
was extinct; proof abounded that the _role_ of small states was played
out. Goldsmith's description, severe as it is, was not unmerited--

Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp array'd,
The pasteboard triumph and the cavalcade;
Processions formed for piety and love,
A mistress or a saint in every grove.
By sports like these are all their cares beguil'd,
The sports of children satisfy the child;
Each nobler aim, represt by long control,
Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul.

Only those who do not know the past can turn away from the present
with scorn or despair. In this century a nation has arisen which, in
spite of all its troubles, is alive with ambition, industry, movement;
which has ten thousand miles of railway, which has conquered the
malaria at Rome, which has doubled its population and halved its
death-rate, which sends out great battle-ships from Venice and Spezia,
Castellamare and Taranto. This nation is Cavour's memorial: _si
monumentum requiris circumspice_.

SALO, LAGO DI GARDA.

CONTENTS

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 eter