We have observed that the Pyrenees, beside being a formidable obstacle and boundary in themselves, were the home of a very independent and unconquered people called the Basques. They are there still, still a people rather apart. Probably they are survivors of one or the other of those early Celtic invasions which swept over Europe and of which there survive also remnants in Brittany and in Wales. They still speak a language unrelated to that of the French on the one side or the Spanish on the other. And what was the story of this Spanish peninsula, thus separated from the rest? We have in the first place to try to understand what the "Moorish conquest," as it is called, meant. It is said that the Moors "swept over" the country. It is a good phrase to express what happened if we take it in the right sense. They "swept over" the country, but that does not at all imply that they swept all the former inhabitants, who probably were chiefly of the Visigothic race, before them. Spain is a country of many mountain ranges. To bear that fact in mind will help us to understand what happened. These mountain ranges provided refuges into which the inhabitants could resort in time of invasion, and whence they could come forth again and take up their lives much as before when the sweeping of the invasion had passed over. Spain was far too large a country for the Moslems who came in to settle and to govern, and it was too much cut up by the mountains. The {176} invaders had not any very settled government or organisation among themselves. They were a mixed company of soldiers, Arabs, Syrians, and Africans. They had no settled purpose in their invasion. They seem not to have known what to do with it when they had achieved it. They achieved it easily, because there was no real resistance, as we have seen, until they crossed into France. But though the Christians of Spain could not combine to resist them, the Christians had some settled interests in common, to hold them together. They had the Church, and they had the combination of their own Gothic laws with the Roman law which they found in Spain when they came there. They had, therefore, some influences to bring them together into that unity which gives strength, and as their numbers grew they became powerful.