Evening star., 1939-07-23
By Blair BoHes.

reduced through imprisonment, exile
and execution, through death in battle
and death by air raid. Into the great
an iron mining and shipbuilding head
quarters Franco has brought
Spaniards from the south, to allay the
Basque fervor for the Basque cause.
The Marseilles street capitol is rep
resented in many countries Informally
by diplomats who possess unofficial pass
ports There are Basque delegations in
London and Brussels and most South
American countries. There is one, too
in New York in the Hotel Elysee, 68
East Fiftv-fourth street. The main
purpose of these extraordinary missions
is to keep alive the determination of
Basques spread around the world for the
Basque independence and to raise money
for the cause.
The diplomats have still more subtle
errand. 1t would be profitless for Presi-
dent Aguirre and his colleagues to hope
that in this day of the airplane bomber
the Bosques could wrest back their prov
inces for themselves through personal
determination and guerilla skill, as in
their mountains they held the provinces
from the Romans and the Moors and
other invaders who tried to take the
Basque country. Leovigild, king of the
Visigoths, captured the provinces in $50
and nobody else accomplished it until
1887.
So Aguirre must rest his hopes on
some mechanism other than revolt. His
diplomats must practice the sort of nice
intrigue which can gain at least unoffl-
cial warmness for the cause of Basque
independence from persons high in Off
cial position in the various countries to
which the diplomatic agents are assigned.
The secretary of the delegation in New
York, Ramon de la Sofa, for instance, is
periodical, although infrequent visitor
to Washington; and when he is in Wash
ington, he visits the State Department
in the guise of Senor de la Sofa, citizen
He was here last week.
Won Points Through Centuries.
The expectations of the exiled Basques
that they will be repatriated might be
dismissed as just a hyperbolic comic
opera overtone for the graver aspects of
modern international affairs. But the
Basques are mysterious people. They
have way of gaining their points. If
their provinces are incorporated once
and for all within the Spanish dominion
and if the people of the provinces are
weaned from their ancient mode of life
and customs to the ways of Spain, then
one of the most ancient races in Europe
will have been brought to its end
The Basques were in Spain when the
Celts arrived, and the Celts came about
500 B. c. The learned men who are
familiar with the antiquities are con-
versant with the movements of the Celts,
but they can only advance well-supported
theories about the origin of the Basques.
No people in Europe are more contradic-
tory than the Basques themselves, the
people who are fiercely democratic but
who struggled all last century for Spain
absolutely monarchical, the people who
have fought for thousands of years so
that they could have some peace.
Contradictions in the information
about them abound. Their ancestors
came from Asia Minor by way of South
ern Europe; their ancestors came from
Somaliland by way of Egypt and what
is now Morocco. To some observers, they
are short people; to one anthropol-
ogist, they are the tallest people in
Spain. They live their own lives in
their mountains and by their coast,
speaking, in large degree, their own
strange language, and wearing their own
particular costumes, enjoying dances
evolved in the Middle Ages, and playing
their national game of pelota.
The Basques, wrote G. L. Steer in his
book about the people and the Spanish
Civil War, are "a religious, deep-drink-
ing, non-swearing race. They are pro-
foundly nautical; they swing and nsh