THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 615 



identify the oldest living population in Europe a direct heritage 

 from prehistoric times. We found it to lie about the city of 

 Pdrigueux, shown on our map (page 633). Here, less than two 

 hundred miles to the southwest, is probably the most primitive 

 spoken language on the continent. Is there any connection dis- 

 coverable 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 perti- 

 nent 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 institu- 

 tions were ideally democratic, worthy of the enthusiasm be- 

 stowed by the "late Mr. Freeman upon the Swiss folk moot. In 

 Vizcaya, for example, sovereignty was vested in a biennial assem- 

 bly 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 out- 

 side authority, ecclesiastical, political, or other; they were en- 

 titled 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.* 



Along with these political privileges many of their social cus- 

 toms 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 like- 

 lier 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. 31'7-334. 



