"They had not been taught to question the wisdom or the humanity of
English criminal law." (_Blue Laws--True and False_, p. 15, TRUMBULL.)

Here and there in New England, following the great immigration from Old
England, from 1630-40, during the Commonwealth, and to the Restoration,
several cases of witchcraft occurred, but the mania did not set its
seal on the minds of men, and inspire them to run amuck in their frenzy,
until the days of the swift onset in Massachusetts and Connecticut in
1692, when the zenith of Satan's reign was reached in the Puritan
colonies.

A few words about the tragedy at Salem are relevant and essential. They
are written because it was the last outbreak of epidemic demonopathy
among the civilized peoples; it has been exploited by writers abroad,
who have left the dreadful record of the treatment of the delusion in
their own countries in the background; it was accompanied in some degree
by like manifestations and methods of suppression in sister colonies; it
was fanned into flames by men in high station who reveled in its
merciless extirpation as a religious duty, and eased their consciences
afterwards by contrition, confession and remorse, for their valiant
service in the army of the theological devil; and especially for the
contrasts it presents to the more cautious and saner methods of
procedure that obtained in the governments of Connecticut and New Haven
at the apogee of the delusion.

What say the historians and scholars, some of whose ancestors witnessed
or participated in the tragedies, and whose acquaintance with the facts
defies all challenge?