of Europe! Think of the holocausts of human lives, and all the attendant
agony of which his diabolical invention has been the cause! What
criminal in history compares in infamy with that unknown--gossip?

A similar madness of superstition, responsible for a like cruel
sacrifice of innocent lives, was the terrible belief in witchcraft.
Having its origin in ignorance and fear, it was chiefly the creation of
hearsay carried from lip to lip, beginning with the deliberate invention
of lying tongues, delighting in evil for its own sake, or taking
advantage of a ready weapon to pay off scores of personal enmity. At any
time to a period as near to our own day as the early eighteenth century,
nothing was easier than to rid oneself of an enemy by starting a whisper
going that he or she held secret commerce with evil spirits, was a
reader of magical books, and could at will cast spells of disease and
death upon the neighbours or their cattle.

You had but to be recluse in your habits and eccentric in your
appearance, with perhaps a little more wisdom in your head and your
conversation than your fellows, to be at the mercy of the first fool or
knave who could gather a mob at his heels, and hale you to the nearest
horse-pond. Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed
eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless
fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous
Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as
helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or
incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to
this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of
the malignant gossip.

In such epidemics of tragic gossip we see plainly that, whatever