Letter by John Richard Green to E. A Freeman, November 17, 1871 (in Letters of John Richard Green, ed. Leslie Setphen, 1901, 308-9):
The Piazza at Florence gave me the same thrill that I remember on the Lake of Lucerne:—I am afraid an even more delightful thrill, for after all Swiss democracy is a democracy of institutions, we admire its constitution, its landesgemeinde and the like, but Florentine democracy was a democracy of men. Teutonic freedom is too often a development of man on one side only, the political, while Italian was (I feel all the answer that lies in that ‘‘was’’) a development of the whole man,—political, intellectual, religious, artistic.
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