identify the oldest living population in Europe—a direct heritage from prehistoric times. We found it to lie about the city of Périgueux, shown on our map (page 632). Here, less than two hundred miles to the southwest, is probably the most primitive spoken language on the continent. Is there any connection discoverable between the two? Whence did they come? Why are they thus separated? Which of the two has migrated? Or have they each persisted in entire independence of the other? Or were they never united at all? Such are some of the pertinent questions which we have to answer.
These people derive a romantic interest from the persistency with which, both in France and Spain, they have maintained until the last decade their peculiar political organization; despite all attempts of the French and Spanish sovereigns through centuries to reduce them to submission. Their political institutions were ideally democratic, worthy of the enthusiasm bestowed by the "late Mr. Freeman upon the Swiss folk moot. In Vizcaya, for example, sovereignty was vested in a biennial assembly of chosen deputies, who sat on stone benches in the open air under an ancestral oak tree in the village of Guernica. This tree was the emblem of their liberties. A scion of the parent oak was always kept growing near by, in case the old tree should die. These Basques acknowledged no political sovereign; they insisted upon complete personal independence for every man; they were all absolutely equal before their own law; they upheld one another in exercising the right of self-defense against any outside authority, ecclesiastical, political, or other; they were entitled to bear arms at all times by law anywhere in Spain; they were free from all taxation save for their own local needs, and from all foreign military service: and in virtue of this liberty they were accorded throughout Spain the rank and privileges of hidalgos or noblemen.[1]
Along with these political privileges many of their social customs were equally unique. On the authority of Strabo, it was long asserted that the custom of the couvade existed among them—a practice common among primitive peoples, whereby on the birth of a child the father took to his bed as if in the pains of labor. This statement has never been substantiated in modern times; although the observance, found sporadically all over the earth, probably did at one time exist in parts of Europe. Diodorus Siculus asserted that it was practiced in Corsica at the beginning of the Christian era. There is no likelier spot for it to have survived in Europe than here in the
- ↑ For an account of these political rights, see W.T. Strong, The Fueros of Northern Spain, in Political Science Quarterly, New York, vol. viii, 1893, pp. 317-334.
