Volume II. Guth na Bliadhna ' leabhar II.]

parts of Spain being those in which their influence was least felt; and as there was necessarily to be a point at which the rival influences of the two elements became neutralised, the fable arose in due course of the existence of yet another racial unit, to which the name of Celtiberians has been given. But such was not really the case. There was no essential difference between the social foundations on which the two elements rested, which were then, as always, substantially the same; and although it is doubtless true that the two peoples presented many points of difference, yet, as will be noted later on, their sense of possessing a common origin (remote enough, it is true) was never entirely eradi­cated from their minds. The principal divisions of the Celts were : the Galaicos, who were in posses­sion of modern Galicia; the Astures, inhabitants of Asturias; the Cantabros, who extended from Villaviciosa to Castro-Urdiales; the Autrigones, Vardulos and Vascones, who occupied territory-corresponding to the Vasconian provinces, Navarre, and part of Aragon; the Ilergones, Bargusios, Lace-tanos, Suesetanos, Cerretanos and Indigetes, who were planted from Huesca to Cataluna; the Edetwnos, who established themselves in Valencia and part of Castellon and Zaragoza; the Contestanos, resid­ing in Alicante and Murcia; the Twdetanos, who dominated the south of Extremadura and the west of Andalusia; the Lusitanos, holding nearly-all Portugal and part of Extremadura ; the Vacceos_r lords of Castilla la Vieja; the Celtiberos, masters of part of Castilla la Neuva and Aragon; the Vetones, who lived in the territory stretching be­tween the rivers Duero and the Guadiana, and were particularly numerous in Extremadura, Salamanca, and Avila; the Carpetanos, who settled in Toledo and part of Madrid and Guadalajara; and the Oretanos, seated in Ciudad Eeal. The Phoenicians and Greeks possessed as their own but a narrow strip of the western sea-board of Spain, extend­ing from Ampurias to Gibraltar. They had, also, another small strip extending from thence to Cadiz. Segorbe, the nearest Celtic possession, was no farther from the Mediterranean than thirty ks.¹ Càrtama, also Celtic, was in the province of Malaga, and in the province of Cadiz the Iberian stuck fast to his mountains.

There is no need of air-built theory in order to
1 About nineteen miles.

understand how it was that the Celtiberian success­fully resisted, throughout the ages, the various attempts that were made either to destroy or to absorb him. It was his lot to be chained to a great promontory, the approaches and exits to and from which were most difficult to negotiate. Even the very seas seemed to press together, and to hedge in, as it were, the daring invaders, whose acquaintance with the art of prolonged navigation was but slender, and whose elementary knowledge of naval warfare rendered them distrustful of the sea as a means of escape from their precarious situation. Surrounded on every side, and with no place to go to in the event of attack, they had thus to conquer, or to suffer martyrdom on the spot in which they had been born and bred.

Whilst in their infancy they resembled pilgrims. But once they had definitely settled in the Spanish Peninsula, they could not leave, closed in as they were by obstacles on every side—obstacles to successfully surmount which required far more art and address than they were possessed of. But at the same time the peculiar geographical con­formation of the country prevented them from being absorbed by new in-coming peoples. When they were attacked they took refuge in the hilly parts, which were admirably adapted for defence. There they were safe, and at liberty to develop their own character and social and political in­dividuality.

A bird's-eye view of the Spanish Peninsula discovers it to be a great promontory, which in­clines from the north to the south. In the centre is a table-land, now made up of the Castiles and Extremadura, with slopes falling abruptly east­wards and more gently westwards, barred by huge mountains and further strengthened by deep and intricate ravines. The highly civilised Phoenicians who were established as merchants on the coasts of Spain during the long period of over five hundred years, undoubtedly imparted to the Celt-iberians a considerable knowledge of agriculture and the mining industry. From their establish­ments at Erythia, Melkarteia, Malaka, Sexi, Abdera, Hispalis, Gadei, Aibusos, Ituci, Olontigi and elsewhere, their civilising and educational influence spread. But when they attempted to penetrate into the interior, they found themselves •confronted by the natives who united to sweep down upon them from their mountain fastnesses and secluded retreats. More sympathetic to the Greeks, because these last were though less aggres­sive yet more enlightened even than the Phoe­nicians, the Celtiberians received from the Greek colonists political, religious and moral teaching congenial to Celtiberian freedom of thought and organisation. The Greeks never assumed the ròic of conquerors, but played the part of friends and helpers to the Celtiberian forces, and looked on unconcerned whilst the great fight for the world's mastership, initiated on Spanish soil, was being waged between Roman and Carthaginian.

How these two great peoples battled, and how the great Hannibal recognised and utilised the military value of his Celtiberian allies, I do not propose to enter upon here. Nor do I propose to discuss the Roman victory, which after years of bloodshed and anarchy was finally effected. Suffice it to say that the independence of the natives was ultimately destroyed, and they were obliged to pass beneath the Roman yoke. What is more to my purpose, however, is to discover as much as possible the causes that led to that defeat, and. to ascertain its social and ethnological effects upon the conquered people. Neither Phoenicians nor Greeks, it is clear, could have made an enduring impression upon the Celtiberian race, so far as the blood of that people was concerned. The Phoe­nicians were discomfited as soon as ever they tried to substitute the art of the warrior for the peaceful employments of the merchant; and the Greeks themselves inform us how careful they had to be to guard against any appearance of hostility or any act which might even indirectly seem to justify the suspicion that they designed to dis­possess the Celtiberian of his lands and towns. More congenial to the natives than either of these two races, the Carthaginians soon won a way to their hearts by obliging themselves to respect their laws and institutions, and by limiting their demands to money and men in order to enable them to carry on the war against the Romans ; and although they brought from Africa vast numbers of soldiers and labourers, they did not succeed in impressing their peculiar and advanced civilisation upon the natives of the Peninsula in general, although they undoubtedly were successful in influencing the populations of Andalusia. The Romans domin­ated Spain, as they did all other countries that they subjected, by means of their superior political insight.

The long centuries of bloody strife which they imposed on Spain, prevented, no doubt, the free de­velopment of the primitive native institutions ; but the Romans endowed the people with a purer and loftier religion, and imparted to them the abstract idea of a united nation, which was much superior to that reflecting a state of society in which the

-cian system was the dominating, if not the only, social and political factor; and as they had done all over the world, in Spain also they subjugated and transformed in the interests of civilisation and pro­gress. What they were powerless to effect, how­ever, was to change the character of the people they found in Spain. Inter-communication was also difficult and frequently dangerous. And it was in consequence of these disabilities that the political growth of the Celtiberians gradually assumed the character of an individualism which was modified only by the pressing urgency of war and by the indispensable intercourse of trade, for which latter purpose they used to form them­selves into confederacies. Although the various degrees of civilisation in the Peninsula produced -various types of society, the vast majority of the Spanish people in those times used to live in small villages, as for instance, the Lusitanos, the Celtici, the Galaicos and the Astures. Where the popula­tion was more advanced, large cities were built, as happened in the case of the Turdetanos. These cities were intended primarily for mutual protection and defence. But in every case, the social founda­tion was the cian -the gentilitas of the Romans— that is to say, groups of several families of the same stock united and became bound by a common tie of relationship, precisely as their kinsmen did in Ireland and Scotland. Each cian, which was independent politically, had its proper religion, its -own law and government, which were wont to be regulated at the Mòd or general appointed meeting-place of the cian. Various clans used to band themselves together into a tribe or mbr-tkuatha, precisely according to the ancient custom of the -men of Eirinn and Alba. These large tribes were essentially political organisations; and each was provided with a capital, or fortified town, in which all the people of the surrounding districts were wont to congregate under the leadership of a chief controlled by one or two assemblies —the Senatus and Concilium. The various tribes, as I have already intimated, formed together a federation, which was ruled by a chief or king and by an assembly, and had its proper name. The analogy between the state of society existing in Celtic Spain and that which obtained in Ireland and Scotland is thus practically complete.

Marriage amongst the Celtiberians was always monogamous. The woman took a leading part in family affairs ; and in many cases took as prominent a place in the government of the town as the man himself. Society was divided into the two " orders " —freeman and slave or serf; and these again were subdivided into several classes, as in Ireland and Scotland. The freemen consisted of aristocrats and plebeians; but the relationship existing between these two classes never assumed a feudal character. The plebeian was practically only a commoner, but his dependence was not derived from a lord (as in Ireland and Scotland) but from a city, where the aristocracy lived. Between chief and follower there was the bond of a pact only ; and this pact in the majority of cases was the Agermanamionto— that is to say, an agreement by virtue of which the warrior freely and unconditionally undertook to follow his leader, to defend him at all hazards, and not to survive him in warfare in the event of his chiefs falling in battle. Of the strength of this¹ connexion between lord and vassal—to use convenient feudal expressions—we have abundant proof in the eases of the two cities of Sagunto and

Numancia, whose inhabitants, after offering a lengthy and heroic resistance to Romans and Carthaginians respectively, voluntarily destroyed themselves, rather than surrender at discretion to their enemies and oppressors.

Martin Hume says, and says truly, in his Spanish People that " notwithstanding the central­ising governmental conditions which the Roman system had grafted upon the primitive town and village government of the Celtiberians," it "had struck so little root in Spain during six centuries, that long before the legionaries left the country the centralised government had fallen away, and the towns with their assemblies of all free citizens survived with but little alteration from the pre-Roman period. No centralising governing genius of Neo-Celtiberian blood continued the national traditions introduced by the Romans, or endeav­oured to employ Roman methods to consolidate Spain into a civil self-constituted nation; and by the time the Goths appeared, all was clear for them to begin afresh on their own lines." These lines, however, were at variance with those of the Celt­iberians, and here is the explanation of the con­spicuous fact to which the same accomplished writer calls attention. " At first sight," he says, " it would appear that such a system as this (the Gothic one) would have been in entire accordance with the individualistic instincts of the Spanish people; but this was not by any means the case; and the permanent influence of Gothic governmental tra­ditions on Spain was comparatively small. The individuality, so characteristic of the Spaniard, arose out of a natural proud personal independence and impatience of restraint by another man; whereas the Gothic recognition of the individual was in a great measure the outcome of the stage of civili­sation the race had reached, and the peculiar road by which it had reached it. The difference will be easily appreciated by the readiness with which the Goth accepted the Arian doctrine of predestination which made the acts of the individual of no im­portance in his spiritual evolution, while the Celt­iberian from the first fiercely asserted the individual responsibility and rational independence of each creature towards his Maker."

The Visigothic invasion had, in fact, very little influence on Spanish culture. Inferior to their predecessors, the Romans, in every respect, they themselves adopted the Latin civilisation to the full —preserving only their language—and soon came to be a military aristocracy hateful to the Celt­iberians. They were unable to reshape their social structure by reason of this fact; but the new intruders, if not directly, at all events indirectly, reinforced the Celtic elements in the Spanish population, which they did by two means, viz., by the importation of great numbers of Celtic slaves from Germany and the Danubian territories, and by a policy of enforced segregation towards the greater part of the old inhabitants—which latter policy they adopted in order to break down the resistance of the natives. So when the Goths, who gradually became absorbed into the Spanish elements, settled themselves as a monarchy which to a certain extent was national, they fell under the influence of the native Concilium, in whose constitution the prelate and the noble were the principal governing factors. The monarch, it is true, was in every case a Goth, and the military chiefs were also Gothic; but it was precisely on this account that the Gothic rule was eventually unsuccessful; for in the hour of trial and danger, the appeal addressed to the subjugated people met with little or no response, so far as their conquerors were concerned.

There can be no other explanation of the rapidity of the Mohammedan conquest. History records the fact that the Arabs were invited, as a friendly party, to favour one of the rival claimants to paramount political power. And history also records the fact that at first the Arab conquerors of the Peninsula respected the religion and the national Customs of the vanquished. And so long as the Moorish campaign assumed the specious character of a kind of crusade in behalf of the re-establishment of the royal prerogatives, and the restoration of the nobility to their patrimonial properties, the progress of the invasion was but slow; and the success which attended it but partial. It was when the ambitions of the Arabs reached the point of demanding unconditional submission on the part of the Spanish people that the first real resistance was offered, within the limits of what is to-day called Castilla la Vieja .and Cantabria. Then Muza was obliged to con­firm what centuries before had been said by a Roman consul touching the Spanish people : " They are lions inside their fortresses and eagles on their horses. They never lose the occasion, if favour­able; and, defeated and vanquished, far from finding dishonour in deserting the battle-ground, climb up to their rough mountains and fastnesses —there to recover themselves, and from whence they swoop down again with renewed ardour, and even greater bravery, for the fight." The eight centuries during which the Peninsula was convulsed more or less continuously, resulted in the consolida­tion of Spanish nationality. To this end the Arabs undoubtedly contributed through the channel of their advanced culture and learning, especially during the critical periods of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

From this time forward, the law and social life, with but comparatively few relapses, began to re­vert to the primitive national ideals. From that time forward began to disappear the feudal system, which had never taken strong root in Spanish soil, and in its place rose again the town, the council and the count (the Gaelic Mor-mhaor), which last was ever the true leader of the people and the typically Spanish title. Then began that great upheaval of the Spanish people, which was des­tined to sway a great part of Europe, and to carry the principles and characteristics of our race to a new world across the seas.

It is no easy matter to determine, theoretically even, the psychology of a nation; but a few charac­teristics of Spain and of the Spanish people may be postulated without fear of error or exaggeration. The Spaniard of to-day, as the Celtiberian of old, is a highly individualised social unit. Individually, he has an overwhelming sense of his own person­ality. He is passionately attached to personal independence. He resists strongly any form of discipline save that which springs from his own innate sense of honour and chivalry. He has a deep sense of his duties to his family, his friends, his town, and his territorial region. He is charac­terised by extraordinary endurance in the face of hardship and adversity. He believes profoundly in the equality of man -whatever the race, the colour, or people, " we are all children of God," he says; and this is his favourite sentiment. He is

Foghlum Naomh anns a Ghàidhealtachd 149

also endowed with a high sense of courtesy, and of that respect which he shows to others and expects others to show to him.

As a social being, he is marked by a deep and enduring affection for his family ; and the relations between husband and wife are those of absolute equality. In law, the common regimen is still the partnership, in equal shares, of all profits accru­ing to husband and wife, no regard being had to the actual or relative measure of their respective properties. Thus the Celtic system is still the foundation of Spanish law. Politically, the Spaniard is characterised by his attachment to decentral­isation—an extremely Celtic feature in his character —and consequently by a certain disregard for the higher solidarity of the nation. But this individual­istic tendency disappears in the face of a threatened national danger or actual calamity, though in times past it must be allowed that it operated very dis­astrously, plunging the country into bloodshed and confusion as often as the higher ideal was lost sight of, and the local divisions and dissensions were allowed to be prosecuted in defiance of the common danger. Fortunately, however, those days are over. Purged and chastened by centuries of political despotism, and sobered by the adversities which she has passed through, the Spain of to-day would neither relish nor tolerate any return to the ancient order of things. She has now permanently founded the conception of Patria, full of life and hope but purged of preposterous optimism, illusion, and bravado, and is only anxious to be led into the ways of peace and prosperity through the channel of a wise and beneficent rule.