peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediæval
laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in
England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen
Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas
Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and
judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described
this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four
thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg,
Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl
was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is
in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there
were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely
added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."

John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with
a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and
evidence." "_But there is a question_," he wisely adds, "whether some of
the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England,
which were followed as patterns here, were not insufficient." Cotton
Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long
list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally,
that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible
vindication of their strong measures.

It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every
other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the
authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural
precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When