to themselves.  Later, as much perhaps from policy as necessity, the race came gradually to fall in with the general governments crystallizing about them.  The Spanish Basques came first into the traces, though not until the thirteenth century; they were then finally incorporated into the Castilian monarchy.  But they claimed and held marked rights in compensation.  While special privileges—­fueros—­were accorded to certain other provinces as well as to them, theirs were the widest and endured the longest.  They had five special exemptions:  they were not subject to military conscription; nor to certain imposts and taxes, (paying a gross composition in their place;) nor in general to trial outside their province; nor to the quartering of troops; nor to any regulations of their internal affairs beyond that of the corregidor, a representative magistrate appointed by the king.  These fueros lasted in substance even up to 1876, when Alfonso’s government finally repealed them.  While thus the Spanish Basques have, even under allegiance, held stoutly to the right of virtual self-government, their brethren north of the Pyrenees long preserved a still fuller autonomy, only coming into the national fold of France under the impetus of the Revolution.

Thus the Basques have a stiff record of independence; it keeps them in no little esteem, both with themselves and with their neighbors.  Trains, travel, traffic, eat into their solidarity, and may in time disintegrate it; but a Basque has not yet lost a particle of his pride of clan; it is inborn and ineradicable; he would be no other than he is; “je ne suis pas un homme” he boasts, “je suis un Basque.”  You note instinctively his straighter bearing among the neighboring French peasantry; you can often single out a Basque by his air.  This hardens into a peculiar result:  since they are all of the same high lineage, all are aristocrats; every Basque is ex officio a nobleman; this is seriously meant and seriously believed.  There are no degrees of caste, the highest is the only; the entire race is blood-proud, ancestor-proud.  A Basque family might not improbably have been the originators of that celebrated family tree which remarked, in a marginal note only midway back, that “about this time the Creation took place.”

They are not stilted in their pride, however; your true Basque cares much for his descent and little for its dignities.  “Where the McGregor sits,” he would affirm, “there is the head of the table,” and so he cares nothing about the nominal headship.  He lives a free, busy life in the hill-country or near the sea, stalwart, swarthy, a lover of the open air, apt at work and sufficiently enterprising, self-respecting, “proud as Lucifer and combustible as his matches,” in no case pinchingly poor, but rarely rich, and never in awe of his own coat-of-arms.