Basque freeholder (_vecino_) could prove himself noble
and thus eligible to any office. They are not a town race; a Basque village
consists of a few houses; the population lives in scattered habitations.
They do not fear solitude, and this makes them excellent emigrants and
missionaries. They are splendid seamen, and were early renowned as whale
fishermen in the Bay of Biscay. They were the first to establish the
cod-fishery off the coast of Newfoundland. They took their full part in the
colonization of America. Basque names abound in the older colonial
families, and Basque newspapers have been published in Buenos-Aires and in
Los Angeles, California. As soldiers they are splendid marchers; they
retain the tenacity and power of endurance which the Romans remarked in the
Iberians and Celtiberians. They are better in defence than in attack. The
failure to take Bilbao was the turning-point in both Carlist wars. In civil
institutions and in the tenures of property the legal position of women was
very high. The eldest born, whether boy or girl, inherited the ancestral
property, and this not only among the higher classes but among the
peasantry also. In the _fueros_ an insult done to a woman, or in the
presence of a woman, is punished more severely than a similar offence among
men. This did not prevent women from working as hard as, or even harder
than, the men. All authors speak of the robust appearance of the
women-rowers on the Bidassoa, and of those who loaded and unloaded the
ships in Bilbao.

_Institutions_.--In their municipal institutions they kept the old Roman
term _respublica_ for the _civitas_ and the territory belonging to it. All
municipal officers were elective in some form or other, and there is hardly
any mode of election, from universal suffrage to nomination by a single
person chosen by lot, that the Basques have not tried. The municipalities
sent deputies to the juntas or parliaments of each province. These
assemblies took place originally in the open air, as in other parts of the
Pyrenees, under trees, the most celebrated of which is the oak of Guernica
in Biscay, or under copses, as the Bilzaar in the French Pays Basque. The
cortes of Navarre met at Pamplona. Delegates from the juntas met annually
to consider the common interests of the three provinces. Besides the
separate municipalities and the juntas, there were often associations and
assemblies of three or five towns, or of three or four valleys, to pr