ountries.[26] But here
arise the questions, how far custom and education in their turn depend
upon environment; to what degree natural conditions, molding economic
and political development, may through them fundamentally affect social
customs, education, culture, and the dominant intellectual aptitudes of
a people. 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. The mountain area of the Southern Appalachians
supported the Union and drove a wedge of disaffection into the heart of
the South. Mountainous West Virginia was politically opposed to the
tidewater plains of old Virginia, because slave labor did not pay on the
barren "upright" farms of the Cumberland Plateau; whereas, it was
remunerative on the wide fertile plantations of the coastal lowland. The
ethics of the question were obscured where conditions of soil and
topography made the institution profitable. In the mountains, as also in
New England, a law of diminishing financial r