vinces except countersigned by the junta. Otherwise the resisting
and even the killing of a royal officer was no murder. But chiefest of all
the safeguards was the provision that no tax or contribution should be
levied or paid to the crown till all petitions had been heard and wrongs
redressed; that such a vote should be the last act of the junta or cortes,
and the money should be paid not as a demand of right or a tax, but as a
free gift and above all a voluntary one. It was paid in a lump sum, and the
repartition and levying were left entirely in the hands of the junta and
the municipalities.

As a further precaution against the inroads of absolutism, no lawyer was
allowed to be a deputy to the junta and all clergy were likewise excluded.
The Basques considered that men of these professions would be always on the
side of tyranny. One lawyer (_letrado_) was present at the juntas for
consultation on the points of law, but he was not allowed to vote. So
strictly was this observed that after the battle of Vitoria in 1813, when
it was difficult to get together a quorum for the reorganization of the
country, the _letrado_, though one of the most active and influential
members in consultation, was not allowed to vote.

The relations between Church and State among the Basques have been very
remarkable. They are a highly religious people, eminently conservative in
their religious practices. In religion alone, through Ignatius de Loyola of
Guipuzcoa and Francis Xavier of Navarre, they have left their mark upon
Europe. They have kept the earliest form of Christian marriage and of the
primitive order of deaconesses, forgotten elsewhere in the West. The feast
of Corpus Christi instituted by Pope Urban IV. (1262) still appears in
Basque almanacs as _Phesta-berria_, the New Feast. The earliest notice that
we have of them speaks of their liberality to the clergy; yet with all this
religious conservatism they have never allowed themselves to be
priest-ridden. They constantly resisted the attempts of the crown to force
upon them the authority of the Spanish bishops. When Ferdinand the Catholic
came to Biscay in 1477 to swear to the _fueros_, he was compelled to send
back the bishop of Pamplona whom he had brought with him. No strange priest
could enter the town when the junta was sitting, and in some places if a
deputy was seen speaking to a priest before a session he lost his vote for
that day. The bishops had no share in ecclesiastica