Cavour seriously thought that among the inconvenient consequences of Garibaldi's ascendency might be a war with Austria, forced on the Government by the victorious _condottiere_ in the intoxication of success. He was resolved as a statesman to do what he could to prevent so great an imprudence. He had assured the British Government in writing that he had no present intention of attacking Austria, and in this he was perfectly sincere. Still he did not shrink from the possibility. He wrote to Ricasoli: "If we were beaten by overwhelming force, the cause of Italy would not be lost; she would arise from her ruins, as Piedmont arose from the field of Novara." To another friend he made what was, perhaps, the only boast he ever uttered: "I would answer for the result if I possessed the art of war as I possess the art of politics." For the rest, he added characteristically, When a course became the only one, what was the good of counting up its dangers? You ought to find out the way of overcoming them.
When Garibaldi entered Naples, Cavour had already decided on the momentous step of sending the king's forces into Umbria and the Marches of Ancona. At the end of August he wrote: "We are touching the supreme moment; with God's help, Italy will be made in three months." If constitutional monarchy was to triumph it could no longer stand still; neither Austrian arms nor republican propaganda could so jeopardise the scheme of an Italian kingdom under a prince of the House of Savoy as the demonstration of facts that the Government of Victor Emmanuel had lost the lead. Moreover, it became daily more probable that, if the king did not invade the Roman States from the north, Garibaldi would invade them from the south, and this Cavour was determined to prevent. If a Garibaldian invasion succeeded, France would come into the field; if it failed, all the great results hitherto accomplished would be compromised. Garibaldi at most could only have disposed of half his little army of volunteers, and in Lamoricière, the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, he would have met a stouter antagonist than the Bourbon generals. But the party of action urged him towards Rome, cost what it might, with the impracticability of men who expect the walls of cities to fall at the blast of the trumpet. Every reason, patriotic, political, geographical, justified Cavour's resolution. It was only by force that Umbria and the Marches had been retained under the papal sway in 1859; there was not an Italian who did not look on their liberation as a patriotic duty. The nominal pretext for the war, as has happened in most of the wars of this century, only partially touched the point at issue; Cavour professed to see a menace in the increase of the Pope's army, and demanded its disbandment. In a literal sense, fifteen or twenty thousand men could not be a menace to Italy. Still it must be doubted if any state could have tolerated, in what was now its midst, even this small force, commanded by a foreign general, composed largely of foreign recruits, and proclaiming itself the advance guard of reactionary Europe. Lamoricière said that wherever the revolution appeared, it must be knocked on the head as if it were a mad dog. By "the revolution" he meant Italian unity.