text:  Yet I thought that society had here reached a point of division; a ridge from which the streams of power naturally took different directions; that the struggles of the democracy were but like the bursting of those monsoons which mark the distinction of seasons in the East; or the ruggedness of those regions of rock and precipice of roaring torrent and sunless valley through which the Alpine traveller must toil before he can bask in the luxuriance of the Italian plain