He immediately
gave a bolder impetus to King Victor Emmanuel's policy by sending a note
to all the Powers, in which he asserted it to be now impossible for
Sardinia to offer any resistance to the inevitable course of events.
Cavour imagined that since Napoleon III had obtained the imperial throne
by a plebiscite, he would not deny the validity of such a claim in
Italy, and forthwith submitted this idea to the Emperor, who was bound
to approve of it. But the French nation was discontented, imagining that
the blood it had shed for Italy had profited nothing, and was, moreover,
very averse to the formation of a powerful kingdom beyond the Alps.
Now it was that Cavour determined on a great sacrifice. In the
convention of Plombieres it had been agreed that, in the event of a
kingdom of eleven million inhabitants being established from the Alps to
the Adriatic, Sardinia would cede Savoy to France. As, however, by the
Treaty of Villafranca, Venetia had remained under the Austrian yoke, no
more had been said about cession of territory, but by the annexation of
Central Italy the number of Victor Emmanuel's subjects was now augmented
to eleven millions.
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