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would have been satisfactorily evinced at the time of the trials, if the accused had been defended by able counsel, learned in the laws of evidence and skilled in exposing falsehood by cross-examination. But there were no trained lawyers in the province. The few persons who were in the habit of acting as counsel had had no regular education in the law. The alleged witches had no counsel whatever. Nor had their judges the competency which that station demands for instructing a jury on an intricate case of felony. Stoughton and Sewall had been educated for the pulpit; two of their five associates were physicians, and one was a merchant; not one was a lawyer. When such men did cruel injustice, it was partly from imperfect knowledge of the rules of proof, and partly because their minds were prepossessed with misleading imaginations. On the whole, the court represented the sense of that portion of the people, with whom a merciful incredulity or a mere natural relenting was least likely to prevail against the bewildering theory of the age. The court was not constituted by the people of Massachusetts, but, without their authority, by the governor set over them by the King; and it was constituted, not of persons possessing the confidence of the people, but largely of former functionaries recently discharged by the popular vote. Stoughton was its head and soul, and he was a man so stubborn that, when his theory had been adopted,

any humane reluctance was to him only an impertinence and a sin. The timid conscientiousness of Sewall precisely prepared him for the sway of his positive and grim associate. Wait Winthrop was rather a feeble person, and something of a courtier. Saltonstall was disgusted with the proceedings from the outset, and refused to sit. Bradstreet's heaviness was wiser than the mercurial temperament of some of his eminent contemporaries. He had steadfastly refused to order the execution of a convicted witch four years before the Salem tragedy; he is not known to have done anything to countenance the follies which had been rife in the last three months of his administration; and there is every probability that, had he continued to be Chief Magistrate, the misery and shame which inaugurated his successor's administration would have been spared.

The transactions which have been described have been visited by the severe reprobation of later times. Yet epidemic delusions, and delusions having tragical issues, have not been so uncommon in history, as that their occurrence should excite surprise as monstrous deviations from the order of human things. Not fifteen years before the alarm of witchcraft in New England, large numbers of innocent men in England had fallen victims to a popular madness, excited by the flagitious fiction of the Popish plot; and in New York, half a century later than the tragedy at Salem, fifty persons were transported

and sold, twenty-two were hanged, and eleven. were burned to death, on regular legal conviction,. for being concerned in a conspiracy, which no sane person has the slightest belief in at the present day, and the history of which only remains to confound the notions of those who desire to place confidence in the truth of testimony, the rectitude of magistrates, and the common sense of men. Especially, no doubt, are such delusions contagious and dangerous when they are associated with religious superstition and with the mysteries of the invisible world. But it needs not they should have that association, to make them capable of interfering with the righteous administration of justice. Judges and juries in the witchcraft trials did not appear more passionately bent on preposterous mischief than did the English courts which fourteen years earlier made themselves the bloody instruments of Oates and Dangerfield, or the New York court which fifty years later transported, hanged, and burned the confederates in a plot that never was made, or the commissioners who administered the Fugitive-Slave Bill of the United States more than a century later yet.

There is one class of thinkers fully entitled to take the ground that an allegation, in any case, of demoniacal agency in human affairs is mere fraud and folly. It consists of those who, reasoning from the attributes of God and his relations to his world, have arrived at the conviction so

wisely maintained in the work of Hugh Farmer, that "all effects produced in the system of nature, contrary to the general laws by which it is governed, are proper miracles, and that all miracles are works appropriate to God." But this result of careful thought is certainly not the state of mind of the great majority of those who now without hesitation reject as essentially incredible all narrations of diabolical intervention. At all events, it is to the last degree improbable that instances of that state of mind were to be found

in the seventeenth century. That belief in a possible demoniacal agency which, partly by force of thought and reasoning, and much more by force of a vague prevailing scepticism, has now to a large extent lost its hold on the popular mind, was apparently the universal belief of the earlier time. The person who, in a careless state of general unbelief, condemns the credulity of believers in witchcraft, has certainly not as definite and respectable a foundation for his theory as they for theirs, however much nearer to the truth he may happen in this particular instance to be.

The estimation of witchcraft as a crime equally real as murder and more heinous, and the practice of punishing it accordingly, were much older than the Puritan occupation of New England. They were much older than the Protestant Reformation. Treatises had been written upon it, laws against it had been enacted, persons charged with

it had been tortured and killed, through ages of Christian history and in distant parts of Christian Europe. It had been punished with a wide carnage as early as the century when the Roman empire became Christian. The superstition had shown no symptoms of decline in the modern ages. In the century of the Revival of Learning patriots and heretics suffered for it. Joan 1431. of Arc was burned as a witch because she delivered her country, and vast numbers of the Waldenses of France and Savoy because they denied the real presence in the Eucharist. A Bull of Pope Innocent the Eighth proclaimed the wide prevalence of the crime, and enforced 1484. on all good Catholics their responsibility for its extirpation,—a measure which, as has been calculated, caused the death of not fewer than a hundred thousand persons in Germany alone. In the district of Como in Lombardy, a thousand witches are related to have been slaughtered in 1524. one year, and one hundred in each of sev1615. eral years afterwards. A little later, five hundred persons charged with witchcraft were put to death in the canton of Geneva, which had then a population not more than half as great as was the population of Massachusetts at the time when the frenzy there cost twenty lives. Within twenty-five years of the popular infatuation in Massachusetts, Sweden had been the scene of a similar delusion and misery, brought about by a similar instrumentality of some un

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