On March 25, 1861, Cavour seized a chance opportunity to repeat and emphasise his views. The question of Rome was, he said, the gravest ever placed before the parliament of a free people. It was not only of vital importance to Italy, but also to two hundred thousand Catholics in all parts of the globe; its solution ought to have not only a political influence, but also a moral and religious influence. In the previous year he had deemed it wise to speak with reserve, but now that this question was the principal subject of discussion in all civilised nations, reserve would not be prudence but pusillanimity. He proceeded to lay down as an irrefragable fact that Rome must become the capital of Italy. Only this could end the discords and differences of the various parts of the country. The position of the capital was not decided by reasons of climate or topography, or even of strategy. The choice of the capital was determined by great moral reasons, by the voice of national sentiment. Cavour rarely introduced his own personality even into his private letters, much less into his speeches; for the last ten years of his life he seemed a living policy, hardly a man. But in this speech there is a touch of personal pathos in the passage in which he said that, for himself, it would be a grievous day when he had to leave his native Turin with its straight, formal streets, for Rome and its splendid monuments, for which he was not artist enough to care. He called upon the future Italy, established firmly in the Eternal City, to remember the cradle of her liberties, which had made such great sacrifices for her, and was ready to make this one too!
They must go to Rome, he continued, but on two conditions--the first was, concert with France; the second, that the union of this city with Italy should not be interpreted by the great mass of Catholics as the signal for the servitude of the Church. They must go to Rome without lessening the Pope's real independence, and without extending the power of the civil authority over the spiritual. History proved that the union of civil and spiritual authority in the same hands was fatal to progress and freedom. The possession of Rome by Italy must put an end to this union, not begin a new phase of it by making the Pope a sort of head chaplain or chief almoner to the Italian state. The Pope's spiritual authority would be safer in the charge of twenty-six millions of free Italians than in that of a foreign garrison. Whether they went to Rome with or without the consent of the Pontiff, as soon as the fall of the Temporal Power was proclaimed, the complete liberty of the Church would be proclaimed also. Might they not hope that the head of the Church would accept the offered terms? Was it impossible to persuade him that the Temporal Power was no longer a guarantee of independence, and that its loss would be compensated by an amount of liberty which the Church had sought in vain for three centuries, only gathering particles of it by concordats which conceded the use of spiritual arms to temporal rulers? They were ready to promise the Holy Father that freedom which he had never obtained from those who called themselves his allies and devoted sons. They were ready to assert through every portion of the king's dominions the great principle of _a free church in a free state_.