It is not difficult to see, back of the astronomy and mathematics and hydraulics of Egypt, the far off sweep of the rain-laden monsoons against the mountains of Abyssinia and the creeping of the tawny Nile flood over that river-born oasis.
[Sidenote: Indirect political and moral effects.] Plutarch states in his "Solon" that after the rebellion of Kylon in 612 B.C.the Athenian people were divided into as many political factions as there were physical types of country in Attica.

The mountaineers, who were the poorest party, wanted something like a democracy; the people of the plains, comprising the greatest number of rich families, were clamorous for an oligarchy; the coast population of the south, intermediate both in social position and wealth, wanted something between the two.

The same three-fold division appeared again in 564 B.C.
on the usurpation of Peisistratus.[27] Here the connection between geographic condition and political opinion is clear enough, though the links are agriculture and commerce.

New England's opposition to the War of 1812, culminating in the threat of secession of the Hartford Convention, can be traced back through the active maritime trade to the broken coastline and unproductive soil of that glaciated country.
In all democratic or representative forms of government permitting free expression of popular opinion, history shows that division into political parties tends to follow geographical lines of cleavage.

In our own Civil War the dividing line between North and South did not always run east and west.