"Cavour," said Lord Palmerston in the classic home of constitutional liberty, the British House of Commons, "left a name 'to point a moral and adorn a tale.'" The moral was, that a man of transcendent talent, indomitable industry, inextinguishable patriotism, could overcome difficulties which seemed insurmountable, and confer the greatest, the most inestimable benefits on his country. The tale with which his memory would be associated was the most extraordinary, the most romantic, in the annals of the world. A people which seemed dead had arisen to new and vigorous life, breaking the spell which bound it, and showing itself worthy of a new and splendid destiny. The man whose name would go down to posterity linked with such events might have died too soon for the hopes of his fellow-citizens, not for his fame and his glory.
After thirty-seven years nothing need be taken away from this high eulogy, and something can be added. The completion of the national edifice within a decade of Cavour's death was still, in a sense, his work, as the consolidation of the United States after the death of Lincoln was still moulded by his vanished hand.
If it be true that the world's history is the world's judgment, it is no less true that the history of the state is the judgment of the statesman. Cavour would not have asked to be tried by any other criterion. He achieved a great result. He doubted if ideals of perfection could he reached, or whether, if reached, they would not be found, like mountain tops, to afford no abiding place for the foot of man. Perhaps he forgot too much that from the ice and snow of the mountain comes the river which fertilises the land. But, if he deprecated the pursuit of what he deemed the impossible, he condemned as criminal the neglect of the attainable. The charge of cynicism was unjust; Cavour was at heart an optimist; he never doubted that life was immensely worth living, that the fields open to human energy were splendid and beneficent. He hated shams, and he hated all forms of caste-feeling. He was one of the few continental statesmen who never exaggerated the power for good of government; he looked upon the private citizen who plods at his business, gives his children a good education, and has a reserve of savings in the funds, as the mainstay of the state.