Ecclesiastical immunities, such as reservation of the criminal cases of the clergy, exemption from military service and other privileges, are expressly maintained in a certain number of pacts.
This treaty and similar pacts with Austria and Hungary were ratified by the Senate, Oct.
It favoured an Anglo-French entente or alliance, seeing therein a substantial guarantee for the due carrying-out of those pacts.
But their representatives, assisted by the senators and deputies of the Basque Provinces in the Cortes, negotiated successive pacts, each lasting several years, securing for the three Provinces their municipal and provincial self-government, and the assessment, distribution and collection of their principal taxes and octroi duties, on the understanding that an agreed sum should be paid annually to the state, subject to an increase whenever the national taxation of other provinces was augmented.
These pacts have hitherto been scrupulously observed, and as the local authorities levy the contribution after their own local customs, landed property and the industrial and commercial classes are less heavily taxed in these territories than in the rest of Spain.
