Another incident has instruction in it, still necessary and worth remembering in the political world. In 1872 I found in the _Boston Globe_, then edited by Edin Ballou, a circumstantial story by the _Constitutional_ of that day, setting forth that Sir James Hudson, our Minister at Turin, begged Cavour to accord an interview to an English gentleman. When Cavour received him, he was surprised by the boldness, lucidity, depth, and perspicacity of his English visitor, and told him that if he (Cavour) had a countryman of like quality, he would resign the Presidency of the Council in favour of him, whereupon the "Englishman" handed Cavour his card bearing the name of Joseph Mazzini, much to his astonishment.
There are seven things fatal to the truth of this story received and circulated throughout Europe without question:--
1. Sir James Hudson could never have introduced to the Italian Minister a person as an Englishman, whom Sir James knew to be an Italian.
2. Nor was Mazzini a man who would be a party to such an artifice.
3. Cavour would have known Mazzini the moment he saw him.
4. Mazzini's Italian was such as only an Italian could speak, and Cavour would know it.
5. Mazzini's Republican and Propagandist plans were as well known to Cavour as Cobden's were to Peel; and Mazzini's strategy of conspiracy was so repugnant to Cavour, that he must have considered his visitor a wild idealist, and must have become mad himself to be willing to resign his position in Mazzini's favour.
6. Cavour could not have procured his visitor's appointment in his place if he had resigned.
7. Mazzini could not have offered Cavour his card, for the reason that he never carried one. As in Turin he would be in hourly danger of arrest, he was not likely to carry about with him an engraved identification of himself.
Nevertheless, the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of that day (in whose hands it was then I forget) published this crass fiction without questioning it.
The reader will rightly think that these are the incredible fictions of a bygone time, but he will conclude wrongly if he thinks they have ceased.
Lately, not a nameless but a known and responsible person, one Sir Edward Hertslet, K.C.B., a Foreign Office official, published a volume in which he related that in 1848 (the 10th of April year, when no political historian was sane) a stranger called at the Foreign Office to inquire for letters for him from abroad. A colleague of Sir Edward's suggested that he should inquire at the Home Office. The strange gentleman replied indignantly, "I will not go to the Home Office. _My name is Mazzini_." This answer Sir Edward put in quotation marks, as though it was really said. Sir Edward has been in the Diplomatic service. He has been a Foreign Office librarian, and is a K.C.B., yet for more than fifty years he has kept this astounding story by him, reserved it, cherished it, never suspected it, nor inquired into its truth.