"Cavour, the only truly European figure of the Risorgimento. Cavour shows no trace of the congenital narrowness which delayed the intellectual emancipation of the agricultural classes. Sprung though he was from the small landed nobility, he succeeded in ridding himself completely of the intellectual attitude of his class, and attaining a wholly modern conception of the economic functions of Society. His scientific education was in the school of Manchester Liberalism. The studies which he published before 1848 on the Anti-Corn-Law League and the Irish question are as good as anything in the literature of the day; unlike the rhetorical exercises of a Bastiat, they reveal a sense of reality and a preference for facts over doctrinal formulae. To the Manchester School Cavour owed not only a general view of the laws governing exchange, but also something deeper and more intimate, not to be expressed in abstract scientific terms: a consciousness of the expansive power of modern industrial Society, and a confidence in individual initiative and enterprise, destroying old habits in order to launch out on a new path fraught with hopes and dangers."