Cesare Balbo was the son of that Count Prospero Balbo who was supposed, in the reign of Victor Emmanuel I., to have supplied a Liberal element to the Government. There had been, however, little in Count Prospero's career to inspire any reasonable confidence in him. He served under Victor Amadeus till the fall of Piedmont before the French; but after the establishment of Napoleon's power he had returned to Piedmont and become head of the University of Turin. After the restoration of the House of Savoy he had taken office again under Victor Emmanuel, and had played the somewhat doubtful part, described above, in the movement of 1821. Cesare had been presented by his father, when a boy, to Napoleon; and though Count Prospero had considered it a dangerous step, the young man had accepted office in Napoleon's Council of State in Turin, and subsequently had served under the same ruler in Tuscany. Although shocked at the kidnapping of Pius VII., he did not abandon the service of Napoleon until the fall of the French Empire in 1814. Yet, after the restoration of the House of Savoy, he entered the army of the King of Sardinia, and fought, first against Napoleon, and then against Murat. In 1821 he managed to remain on friendly terms with Santa Rosa, while he was at the same time advising Charles Albert to break with the Revolutionists, and was also trying to hinder the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution at Alessandria. Such was the man who now tried to tell Italy of her hopes. While appealing to Gioberti as his master, and declaring his preference for a moderate party, Balbo dwelt on the want of national independence as the chief source of the evils of Italy, and particularly on the control exercised by the Austrians over the Pope. He urged his countrymen to put aside the old ideas of Dante, and not to go back further than 1814 for their conception of Italian Unity. He then proceeded to examine the different schemes for attaining this unity, and, rejecting alike the schemes of Monarchists and Federalists, as well as the plan for a closer unity put forward by the Republicans of the Giovine Italia, he pointed out as the only real hope for Italy the possibility of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent chance that Italy might be freed in the scramble which would follow. It is well to dismiss this book of Balbo's first, because its only worth is that it shows what scraps of comfort were caught at eagerly by Italians at this period; but, as a matter of fact, its publication was slightly later than that of the "Primato" of Vincenzo Gioberti, to which Balbo alludes in the preface to his book.